The rise and fall of an Empire
by BalrogGodZanus
Summary: The war has been raging for years. Every day Voldemort gains more of an empire. Then several events cause the world to turn on its ear very violently...
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: I do not own any part of the rights on the works of J.K. Rowling, Dale Brown, or Tom Clancy. They own the characters, some of the concepts, some of the technology described and parts of the writing style. In addition, please note, this is being posted on a fan fiction website, so if you try to sue me you are being an idiot of massive proportions. This is an AU of all known timelines from the aforementioned authors' books. I have altered, omitted and outright changed certain parts of all the timelines as I see fit.

Now the sun will rise as brightlyAs though no misfortune had befallen in the night!Misfortune came to me alone, But the sun shines on everyone!--translation of Nun will die Sonn' so hell' aufgehn, by Friedrich Rückert, used by Gustav Mahler in Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children)

This is a classified record of a terrorist incident and the subsequent events. Defense and State department prosecutors will punish all unauthorized personnel viewing these documents to the fullest extent of the law on charges of high treason.

Day 1

Location: French ICBM site, near Istres, Vaucluse region, exact locale classifiedTime: 0145 GMT, 29 November 2001

The night was cold and dark as pitch. The commandant of the Second Missile Squadron had long since left his post and gone to the domain of Morpheus, leaving his deputy in charge. When Lieutenant Prudhomme received a message that a technical crew had arrived at the front gate, he had no reservations letting them in, as the missile guidance systems were due for an update in the first place. The clearance codes they entered at the silo elevators were a little outdated, but the security personnel just wrote it off as the team not having been notified of the latest security codes. I mean, who in their right mind would try to infiltrate a missile base?

The fact that the software update was affected in the dead of night was a little strange, but still it rated only a 3.6 on the weird meter. The team seemed to know what they were doing, unbolting the computer access panel with all the speed and precision of a racing pit crew. When they asked the guard to wait outside, he thought nothing of the pittance, and freely waited in the hallway just outside the door. He had no interest in the inner working of the nineteen meter

As he stood with his back to the door, whistling Le Marseilles, the light inner door to the hall way opened silently. Before the guard what was what, a dagger pushed between his ribs, transecting his aorta and subclavian artery and perforating his left lung. As this happened, a screwdriver was jammed into the base of his medulla oblongata, disrupting all autonomic brain functions. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Half of the group of sixteen 'technicians' moved to the control room, under the pretense that the upgrade to the new system would be much more efficient if the group of now eight techies could have free reign of the fire control room. The guards knew that what the techs asked went against every regulation in the book, but frankly, they weren't paid enough to watch over the nerd herd like a bunch of paranoid nitwits. After twenty minutes though, the guards decided that more than enough time had passed to simply install a patch on a computer program, and they tried the door. To their infinite mortification, the damn thing would not budge a centimeter; they tried to force the entry open, put the material used to make the gateway was four inches of steel reinforced concrete. Prying it off its hinges would be difficult and dangerous for rather obvious reasons.

No matter how much force they applied to the door, it simply would not move, much like a petulant Great Dane. Even when they knocked the hinges out the door stayed in place, contrary to the very design and physics of the gateway. When the titanium pins in the hinges were removed, the obstacle to entry should have fallen forward, crushing anything in the path of the door, and yet, the concrete gate remained immobile. After ten minutes of attempting to get the door open, the heavy access point suddenly fell to the floor, crushing one of the men attempting to open it into a gummy protein paste.

After the remaining men recovered from the shock of one of their compatriots being literally squashed like a bug, they rushed into the control room, only to find it empty. When they looked at the surveillance monitors, they found neither hide nor hair of the technical crew in any of the missile silos, nor in any other part of the base. Almost ninety-eight percent of the controls and human interface devices such as keyboards were smashed beyond repair, but the monitors and safety systems, strangely, were left intact. The immediately noticed that the lights signifying the condition of the missiles was set to armed, and the outer and inner launch prevention doors to all eight silos were open.

Only a few seconds after they entered, warning klaxons began blaring, and a yellow warning light began flashing in a three-second cycle. On the monitors, the missile controllers could see the automated silo lockdown sequence that preceded a 'hot' launch, and all access to the missiles by any personnel was cut off to prevent unnecessary casualties. With a single great roar, the very earth trembled as if some unholy demon had been unleashed, and most of the CCTV cameras in launch silos melted from the intense heat. The missiles rose slowly at first, inching their way towards the sky, and they gradually accelerated to over two thousand miles an hour before their fiery trails winked out of sight in the dark night sky.

Before the soldiers could recover from the horrifying sight of armed nuclear weapons launching themselves from their silos, rifles fitted with military grade silencers cut them down. High-powered assault rifles and carbines peppered the men's bodies with bullets of calibers ranging from .22 to .50, dispensing their lives in short order. The sixteen commandos that had entered the base left quickly in their stolen vehicles, vanishing into the night like wraiths, leaving nothing but dozens of dead soldiers, footprints and eight empty silos in their wake.

CDC Headquarters, Atlanta, Georgia

Same time ( PM EST, 28 Nov.)

Six power substation all around the state of Georgia had suddenly and mysteriously gone offline, all within seven hours of the first. Normally, this would have been attributed to the ever-increasing demands on the remaining power substations, but when six are virtually destroyed in such a short time frame, it is seen as domestic terrorism. In response to an incident of domestic terrorism, all high-security facilities and complexes with potentially dangerous contents are reinforced with on hand Special Forces. The Atlanta PD were out dealing with effects of a blackout, namely looting and general anarchy, so a platoon of Navy SEALs was flown in from Little Creek in Virginia to guard the CDC headquarters.

The deep-freeze biocontainment facilities in the third subbasement of Building 7B should have normally been impenetrable. Unfortunately, the security systems had been in the process of being reset after they had lost power earlier in the day, but what most did not know was that the systems had been made beyond useless. Even the time locks on the bio-vault doors were non-functional, meaning anyone with enough willpower, not to mention firepower, could force their way into a room with species killer viruses. The freezer was slowly warming, but blocks of dry ice were being brought in every eight hours to prevent bacterial growth, which might cause transcriptase mutations in the RNA.

Even with the night vision devices provided by the navy, seeing anything in the cramped and pitch-black corridors was near impossible, and forget about making a defensible position. The corridors were barely wide enough for three people to walk through at any one time, and the batteries in the emergency lights had since run out, leaving little light to help illuminate the situation. With every interminably boring minute that passed, the SEALs became ever more lax and relaxed. This showed only in the details, little actions, such as leaning against the wall with their rifles slung over the shoulder instead of standing with backs ramrod straight and rifles at port arms.

Thusly, when seven figures clad in black rounded the corner with T91 assault rifles clasped in their arms, they figuratively had their pants around their ankles. The strange thing was the seven figures never fired their rifles. They shouted, they screamed, and they caused fantastic bursts of light, but never once did they fire their rifles. Within three minutes, the entire eight-person SEAL team was dead, and all without a single abrasion, laceration or perforation caused by hostile actions.

Five hours and twenty-two minutes later, the guard changed, and the new guard shift immediately discovered that there had been a major security breach during the night. The heavy door to the steel vault was slightly open, and the Li-ion battery operated temperature gauge showed a large spike and a long, slowly rising period, proving that the freezer had been opened during the night. The contents of the freezer looked as if no human hand had ever disturbed them, but it was obvious what was missing, for under specific headings in the log, there were no samples to find.

It would take time to correlate the missing Petri dishes and vials with the specific entries in the logbook, but within a week, the specific strains taken would be named. Under the heading of Filoviridae, missing were strains of Zaire Ebola virus Mayinga, the deadliest form of Ebola, and Lake Victoria Marburg virus, a relative of Ebola. Under the heading of Variola (Smallpox), samples of eight weaponized and three natural strains of smallpox and several hybrids were gone from the freezers. Under the headings for Influenza, a strain of the 1919 Spanish flu H1N1, H1N2, H3N8, and a mutation of the base form of Avian influenza labeled H5N1 v. A2, which appeared to be a human-to-human transmittable.

Just as at the missile site, the intruders left without a single trace; not a single fiber, not a single blood drop was left to identify the attackers.


	2. A Blood Red Dawn

A blood red Dawn

SAC-NORAD Primary Command, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

0238 GMT, 29 November 2001 (7:38 PM MST, 28 Nov 2001)

In the relaxed calm of the climate controlled NORAD control room, many of the night controllers used the eight-hour shift as their own personal naptime. They hadn't been put on an alert status higher than DEFCON 4 since the end of the Soviet Union and Cold War, so why bother expecting something that hadn't happened in the last ten years. When the loud three-tone warning signifying the detection of missile launch came in though, every one of the men and women snapped into a flurry of action.

"Is that a missile launch? I mean a real one?"

"I doubt those are gift baskets, Lieutenant."

"Call Commander Rickenbacker and get General Eberhart on the line now! We have to let Space Command and NORTHCOM know about this, and get SAC ABM options back online. BMEWS at RAF Fylingdales sees a multiple missile launch from… Europe, narrowing the search area… Western Europe, narrowing further… France? Why the hell would they launch missiles?"

"Are we sure this isn't some kind of readiness drill? They've done…"

"A readiness drill with a missile launch from France? Are you nuts? Why the hell would they…"

"One-three-Sierra-Whisky-Sierra TRACSAT constellation sees eight outbound signals from French first line strike base Mike-2-Alpha-Victor-Golf; known missile type is Minuteman III, range of 5200 miles, probable warhead is Tango-November-niner-zero, yield 3 to 5 megatons. Other first strike bases are quiet, and no evidence of launches from any Le Triomphant SSBN station or the L'Inflexible SSBN station. Seven signals appear to be moving to the north-northwest towards the UK, while the eighth is moving west-southwest over the Atlantic. First seven sigs have high flight arcs, short-range targets likely, probable targets in United Kingdom displayed on the big board, targets in Russia, Iceland and Greenland should be up in a few moments. Sig eight has a shallower flight arc, probable intermediate to long range shot, headed toward New England; probable targets are displayed on big board two."

"Notify FEMA, I want the entire northeast in fallout shelters in twenty minutes."

"Commander, that's not possible! Half the fallout shelters have been demolished and the other half is condemned. Most of the warning systems were disabled in the late seventies and early eighties."

"Then sound the air raid sirens, tornado sirens, fire engines, police cars, bullhorns, I don't care what you sound, just get people to safety now!"

"Notify British military liaisons, it looks like the UK is going to be hit damn hard. Try to get as many people as possible into shelters or the subway stations as fast as possible, and keep it up until the missiles hit."

"General Eberhart is on line 3, and British Air Marshall Stirrup is on line 1. SecDef Ryan is holding on line 2, and the President is on line 4. Every one of them is screaming for answers, and Ryan is asking whether this is some kind of move against NATO. We have someone on the secure command access line; he has identified himself only as codename Fafnir, and he is requesting priority access to the nuclear command structure. Apparently, Fafnir is a codename that only the base commander or General Eberhart can authenticate. A search on the name brought up several top-secret files that we could not access. Should we let him through the firewall?"

"No. I have never heard of this 'Fafnir' character, and I doubt that General Eberhart has heard of him either. If that moron wants in, tell him that he has to go through proper channels like everyone else. And give the SecDef this exact message, verbatim: 'A move against NATO from inside NATO?' It makes no sense, and hell, its France! The last time they attacked anyone first was in 1803 under Napoleon. Why would they even …"

"Target envelopes are closing. Probable strike on London, probability of .961 according to the computers, we can count that one as definite; time to impact is approximately 14 minutes at present missile velocity. Bristol, probability of strike is .883, impact in 15.3 minutes at present velocity. Leeds second most probable strike location with .914, ETA of warhead is 14.1 minutes at present missile velocity. Four other targets deemed most likely are in descending order of probability, Manchester at .794, Cardiff at .788, Belfast at .780, and Glasgow at .778. Projected ETA envelope is 17-25 minutes; tell Air Marshall Stirrup to get the Royal Family to safety now, and to sound alarms throughout the nation. Sig eight's target envelope now limited to states of New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, parts of Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and all of Washington D.C. ETA envelope is now 26-38 minutes at present velocity of 1.94 kilometers per second."

"Notify Washington; get the President and the whole NCA onto NEACP now. Get Congress out of Washington and to the old blast shelters. Don't argue with me Torsten just do as I said. Tell Travis AFB to get at least three Mercury aircraft in the air ASAP or we might be FUBAR."

"I am receiving confirmation from RAF Strike Command; civil defense warnings in London, Manchester, and Belfast are online and sounding. FEMA reports that all civilian electronic transmissions from broadcasting stations on the Eastern Seaboard are now transmitting the standard emergency warning with special instructions. The President and his staff are now en route to Andrews AFB, and the Vice President is being moved from her suite in Hanoi to a secured location. Designated survivor is Janine Allison Fitzpatrick, Vice President, staying on USS Theodore Roosevelt, Charlie-Victor-November-seven-one, current location at holding station India-Zulu-Yankee-two-six-seven-Lima."

"Are we absolutely sure this isn't some kind of drill?"

"Negative. Independently collected data from RAF high altitude radars and BMEWS confirms that this is not a drill."

"ETA to first impact now 8 minutes. Target envelope on sig eight has narrowed to an ovoidal plane of one hundred miles major radius and sixty miles minor radius, centre of 40° 45' N, 73° 50' W, probable targets displayed on big board two. Projected casualties are now approaching 110 million."

"We have confirmation; the royal family of the UK is safe in Balmoral Castle, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. NEACP has just left Andrews and is en route to safe house Kilo-2-1-Quebec, grid reference Uniform-Sierra-four-four-seven-two-six-one-niner-Oscar-November. The President and the SecDef have made it very clear that we are not to launch retaliatory strikes until we have confirmation that this is part of an actual attack. He has ordered us to go to DEFCON 1, posture one-Alpha-zero. All nuclear launch orders are to go through him, via the Football. Repeat, there will be b u no /u /b nuclear launches without the President's express approval on the target and intention of the strike in question. We have been ordered to reactivate all nuclear commands to prepare for full scale war."

"Roger, DEFCON One, posture one-Alpha-zero. Activating 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman AFB, 47th Missile Squadron at Tsiolkovsky Spaceport, Maine and Third Missile Group at Cochrane Spaceport in Montana, the first three commands are signaling full readiness for full thermonuclear conflict. Informing all commands that all leaves and vacations are cancelled until further notice, violators are to be rounded up by the MPs, using any force necessary, excepting deadly force. Four flights of eighteen B-52I Stratofortresses are moving to Diego Garcia, Indian Ocean. We are receiving notices of confirmation from King's Bay, Bangor and San Diego; all boomers are leaving the barns as quickly as possible. Our boomers should be at their assigned fail-safe points in less than three days, and each should have an escort of two to three attack subs."

"Target envelopes in the UK have retracted to twenty miles square. Projected impact at London in five… four… three… two… one… impact!"

"Jesus tap-dancing Christ! Look at that fireball! It has to be at least two miles wide! That's got to be a full megaton device, at the very least."

"We have lost North Atlantic TRACSATs one, four, six, eight, nine and ten. TRACSATs two, three, five, seven, eleven and thirteen are moving to compensate for the loss. Resolution is reduced by 24.22 percent, and we will not be able to see high definition photos of the areas around GZ until the formation is repaired. Next impacts are projected in three, two, one, and zero! TRACSAT confirms Cardiff and Bristol are hit. Next impact is at Manchester in seven, six, five four, three, two, one, zero, goodbye Manchester and Manchester United. Leeds in six, five, four, three, two, one, zero; Leeds is gone. Projected casualties are now above forty-four million and still rising."

"What about the missile over the Atlantic?"

"Signal eight now has a target envelope of 750 square miles, centered on New York City. Probability of strike on New York City is .971; we can count that as a certainty. Time to target is 12 minutes 17 seconds. Update FEMA and get them to evac NYC on the double. Sanders! You go over the NEACP station and …"

"What about ABM options? Do we have any?"

"Negative. No effective anti-ballistic missile systems are currently in operation. It would take three days to get the first one ready to fire in any case."

"Glasgow in six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. Belfast in three, two, one, zero. All targets in UK have been hit; we see blast damage in all seven targets, and it is consistent with a warhead in the one to three megaton range. We have no idea what kind of damage we could be looking at, at least until we rebuild the TRACSAT net."

"What is the status on the evacuation of New York?"

"The UN Security council, most of the general assembly and the General-Secretary have evacuated and they are on their way to Chicago, and from there they will be moved to St. Louis. Most of the ancillary committees and councils have moved to temporary headquarters in southern New Jersey, upstate New York and Massachusetts Bay. They should be safe there from the radiation, thermal, flash and blast effects, but headquarters that are more permanent will be setup in the next few weeks."

"How about the civilians' situation?"

"Every road is clogged with traffic, the airports are gridlocked, and the Air Combat Command is going nuts trying to get all the airliners out of the projected damage path. We might save about 7 percent of the city's total population, but beyond that, it is just too late to do anything."

"Get Air National Guard cargo and rescue helicopters if you have to, just get more people out. Move all military assets out of the area and …"

"Sending people into the area will only create more casualties, sir. It is simply too late."

"New York warhead impact in twelve seconds, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero!"

New York, New York, United States

03:31:13 GMT, 29 November 2001 (10:31:13 PM EST, 28 Nov)

The warhead's ground zero was located directly above the neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen, about three eighths of a mile from the boundary with Downtown Manhattan. Within a single second of the implosion that created the superhot temperatures and super high pressures needed for the deuterium-tritium fusion processes to occur, a fireball more than a quarter of a mile wide had formed at 3000 feet. The fireball initially burned at more than 50000 °F, over four times hotter than the surface of the sun, and the internal pressures reached more than one hundred million times the pressure of the atmosphere. Over the next twelve seconds, the fireball expanded rapidly to a maximum diameter of just over 1.6 miles, and as the massive ball of flame expanded, the temperature gradually cooled to just over 5500 °F. The radius of the fireball was greater than that of the height of the burst, and as such, over a thousand tons of material was almost instantly converted into a quasi-plasmatic state from the heat, increasing the luminosity of the fire at an exponential rate. For just over a minute and a half, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut beheld a second sun, more than a million times more intense then the star some 93 million miles away. Shadows permanently etched themselves into the streets, buildings and sidewalks, making a grizzly mausoleum of shades of black and grey.

A wave of 22-psi overpressure moved ahead of the initial shockwave, shattering windows into innumerable pieces, smashing so much decorative masonry and sending cars flying into the air. The brick buildings directly below the fireball didn't have a snowball's chance in hell; the bricks superheated to over 4000 degrees Fahrenheit. Above 1700 °F, construction quality, non-fire bricks become ticking time bombs ready to explode violently at the slightest touch; at 4000 degrees, each individual brick could have the explosive power of five pounds of C4. The compression force of the overpressure made the hundreds of thousands of bricks shatter both outward and inward, creating billions of molten fragments that destroyed anything in their paths. All of this happened in nanoseconds.

Only five seconds after the initial explosion, the outer pressure wave was more than 2.75 miles from ground zero. The modern steel and aluminum built skyscrapers in the Downtown district swayed dangerously away from GZ, like palm trees in a hurricane. When the second pressure wave hit eight hundredths of a second later, the skyscrapers simply snapped off their bodies from a third of their total height. The blast of heat melted the glass into molten pools, it caused any person caught in it to spontaneously combust, cremating them in ten-thousandths of a second, and their ashes were swept up in the following windblasts. When the tops of the skyscrapers hit the ground, the massive shockwaves shook every solid surface within them to a rough powder, furthering the radioactive spread.

Twenty seconds after the detonation, the shock wave had reached Staten Island, and while the force driving the wave had lessened considerably, the force of the overpressure collapsed hundred-year-old buildings instantly. The newer industrial complexes didn't collapse, but when the heat wave reached them, any flammable surface became a major fire hazard. Propane containers became deadly firebombs, natural gas lines exploded, taking out dozens of blocks almost instantaneously. Within microseconds, over a hundred city blocks were destroyed in the largest gas explosion in seventy years. The heat was later calculated to have reached a final temperature of 3184.1°C, hot enough to ignite the hydrocarbons in ordinary plastics such as in children's toys or plastic soda bottles. The wind picked up the rubble and the now high-velocity rubble buffeted anything in front of it, which in turn helped to reduce even more structures into rubble, and they too became part of the unstoppable force.

Forty seconds after the detonation, the 225 mph after-winds began drawing dust and larger particulate matter back toward GZ, irradiating billions upon billions of micron-sized particles and sending them into the upper troposphere. From there, the radioactive particles would distribute over millions of square miles of ocean and land, carried by the winds, happily quadrupling cancer rates all over the world. The characteristic mushroom cloud had only just begun forming and was no more than two kilometers high, but it was expanding at a rate of more than 340 mph upwards and 20 mph outwards. The few surviving photographs of the cloud would be called, by engineers, excellent examples of real-life Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. By now, most of the population of the city was either dead or dying. The sedans, trucks, vans and taxis clogging the bridges off the island of Manhattan flew about like leaves in a high wind, while the people inside were cooked alive almost instantaneously.

Two minutes forty-five seconds after the detonation, the mushroom cloud had reached its maximum width at just over 2.4 miles wide, but the top of the cloud was now eleven kilometers from the ground and it was still rising at 190 mph. By now, the blast and pressure waves had dissipated, and the afterwinds were pulling ever more material into the deadly cloud of dust and ash, which by now weighed several hundred tons. With every second, over three tons of particulate matter was swept into the cloud, effectively doubling its mass every few minutes. By now, the larger pieces of irradiated material had begun the slow descent to earth, creating the most unpleasant effect of a nuclear detonation: the fallout. The clouds contained high levels of Iodine 131, Cesium 137, Iron 59, and extremely high levels of Cobalt 60 and Zinc 65, providing evidence that this warhead had been "salted" to produce high radiation levels.

Nothing could stop the cloud's rise into the mid stratosphere. Almost as soon as the cloud broke into the jet stream, tons of radioactive isotopes began a slow inexorable march over the northern hemisphere, leaving a trail of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation in its wake. A strange curve in the local jet stream caused a large part of the toxic cloud to move, contrary to the normal circulation route, to the west over New England. The heavier particulate matter settled into the torrential rain system that had occupied the area for the last three weeks, bringing radioactivity down with each tiny raindrop. The water began soaking in to the nearly saturated ground and eventually it would contaminate most of the water tables in the area, making the local water supplies toxic for decades. Most of the cloud began moving to the east, over the ocean, where the medium sized particles would eventually drift down and contaminate hundreds of cubic kilometers of ocean water. The fine particles would stay in the air for years, falling to earth gradually, making sure that cancer rates stayed at high levels throughout the northern hemisphere.

Secured Facility, United States, grid reference Uniform-Sierra-four-four-seven-two-six-one-niner-Oscar-November, exact location classified above top secret

0340 GMT, 29 November 2001 (9:40 PM CST, 28 November)

"Sir, we have received confirmation. Nuclear detonations have occurred above seven cities in the United Kingdom and New York. Damages are expected to be close to total, with at least seventy million casualties in dead, wounded and missing."

"Thank you, Jack. Now what does the Defense Department know about this attack? Is it a move against the principal partners in NATO, is it a freak accident, or is this some kind of terrorist incident on a scale which we have never seen before?"

"President Chirac has assured us that this is not of his doing, nor is this missile launch sanctioned in any way, shape or form by his government. Early reports from a scout team in the area indicate that the personnel in control of the missile site are dead. It is my belief that this is a terrorist incident, and the French government should bear no responsibility for the previous events."

"Ryan you're up. Have either one of your departments picked up anything that would have given us forewarning? What about your contacts in the Air Force Intelligence Command? You do still hold the rank of Colonel, do you not?"

"Negative. Neither the CIA nor the NSA have picked up any chatter that would normally precede an operation of this magnitude. The LifeGuard system has not sent any computer documents that indicated any operations of this type anywhere in the world. If they planned this at all, they did not use computers at any stage in either planning or execution. I had thought this to be impossible at this point in time, where computers are used for just about everything. The Air Force has picked up nothing, and yes I am still Colonel Ryan A. Potts, on detached service to the IIC, serial number 9241-614-32ZB-AA."

"Okay, so you both agree that this is a terrorist incident. Now, which particular group of terrorists are we dealing with? Could it be Osama bin Laden with his merry band of nitwits, Khaled Mashaal and his unique brand of assholery, or is it someone we haven't met before? Any way you slice it, I don't care who they are, I want them hung from the highest branch of the tallest tree on live satellite television. Nobody but nobody attacks America without severe consequences. First impressions gentlemen, I want to hear 'em."

"Kevin, I don't have a clue. I don't know who could have done this without some word leaking out. From a practical standpoint, it is simply impossible to do these types of operations without security leaks of some sort."

" i b I /b /i , however, do have an idea as to who may have done this, Kev. A fortnight ago, we began tracking strange movements of large numbers of both troops and equipment in the British Isles. I have conferred with the British military liaisons, and they told me that they had no troops or equipment of the sort our recon birds saw in those parts of the country. Strangely, when the birds took a second look for the equipment and troops ninety-six minutes later on the next satellite pass, they were nowhere to be found. They would reappear sporadically, but whenever the sats would look for them again, they had vanished into nothingness. Whoever owns the equipment and commands the troops is our man."

"That sounds good, although I have one bone of contention with that supposition of yours, Ryan. You said that these troops and pieces of equipment were located in the British Isles. Now why would anyone in the British Isles launch nukes at their own country? It does not make sense."

"I don't know why, but it is possible that these troops and equipment belong to a group of anti-monarchists attempting to overthrow the Crown. I believe this because of the targets that were selected. All the cities were the command centers for regional military commands, all were near at least one of the known royal residences, and three of them were the capitals of a part of the UK. If the terrorists were planning a decapitation strike, then they very nearly accomplished their goal; the Queen and most of the command staff were set to return to London early tomorrow morning."

"It sounds good, but how do you know these 'troops' were just a bunch of drunken civilians out partying after a soccer match?"

"Do drunken civvies have access to former Soviet Surface to Air missile systems, Katyusha rocket launchers and T62 tanks? If they do, then it is entirely possible."

"I don't know; you can get almost anything over the internet nowadays. I once saw a guy offering a shrunken head for a thousand bucks."

"The IIC keeps very close tabs on the sale of any current or former military technology, and we have not noticed any significant purchase orders in the last fifteen years. Every now and then you'll see the odd T62 being sold off to some eccentric multimillionaire, but the formations we saw had at least a hundred tanks, and forty Katyusha mobile rocket launchers. You can't just shrink those things into toy-sized pieces and carry them through security checkpoints, it is literally and physically impossible. We flag any order of more than one of those tanks or rocket launchers –with the ones we don't flag we follow up– and I am telling you that they could not have come through any internet site, period, and end of discussion."

"It is not the end of the discussion Ryan; we have to figure out where these people got the equipment."

"Gentlemen, gentlemen, you are getting off course. Right now, you are telling me who is probably responsible, and what we should do about this whole situation. We can argue about where the military equipment came from later. Now Jack, you tell me whether this might have something to do with Al Qaeda."

"It is highly unlikely. Bin Laden usually prefers to make grandiose claims of being able to duplicate his attacks within minutes of their occurrence and at any place on the planet. He also prefers to proclaim responsibility as loudly and obnoxiously as possible, and as soon after the attacks as humanly possible. He has done neither, and the probability that this was one of his designs is microscopic."

"We don't have to worry about bin Laden. With a single command, I can send a missile straight up his ass and have it pop out of his mouth. If he so much as twitches we can have him dead before he can blink. One of his personal bodyguards is a deep-cover agent, and he has kept us informed of every single change of address of Mr. Bin Laden."

"The man is on the FBI Top Ten Terrorist list, and you don't supply his location? That could be construed as obstruction of justice."

"You didn't ask Kev, and I didn't tell. Besides, he's in southern Tajikistan, and they won't let us into their country for almost any price. If I remember correctly, the last time we even asked, they demanded special economic considerations and a permanent spot on the UN Security Council, 'or else'. I had every reason to believe that their price would just as outrageous this time. They have been antagonistic and sort of tetchy ever since the revolution in '98."

"Potts thirty, Martindale seven. I'm putting my money on him, Kevin. I've lost too many bets."

"You don't gamble Jack."

"It's a figure of speech, get over it."

"In any case Kevin, you now know the long and short of it. I have to leave for a prior engagement now, but I will be at the press conference in two hours. Farewell."

Two hours later, the President gave a live televised speech to the nation. The transcript of the speech follows:

"My fellow Americans, it is with great sadness that I address you tonight. I must inform you that at approximately 10:31 PM Eastern, the city of New York was obliterated by a 5-megaton thermonuclear warhead. Over ninety-five percent of the city has been destroyed, and forces unknown have heinously murdered almost twenty-seven million people.

"We do not know who is responsible for this tragedy but I will assure you that they will not escape punishment. This is not only an atrocity against America, but also an attack on the sovereign state of United Kingdom; seven cities in the United Kingdom now no longer exist, and the casualties are expected to run close to 93 million people with all attacks combined.

"We do not know what the intentions for this attack are, but if they were to bring America to its knees, then it has failed. We may be down, but we are most certainly not out, nor will we throw in the towel before the final bell.

"I now ask you, the people of this great and powerful nation, to support me as I ask Congress to declare war on the evil that has orchestrated these attacks with all the righteous might of these United States. An assault of this magnitude must be met with our valor, our blood, even our very lives to ensure that these evildoers will not escape our righteous retributions, and that evil such as theirs will not tarnish the surface of the earth. While we may not know precisely who is behind these attacks, we can be sure that they hold no reservations on committing mass murder, which is precisely what these attacks were. Mass. Murder.

"I say in the immortal words of the 35th President's inaugural speech that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and success of liberty. We have already paid a terrible price for liberty; in the Revolutionary War many died to make this nation a reality; in the Civil War, brother fought against brother and America knew great suffering. In World War II, America lost a great many of its best and brightest to the works of dictators and the notions of fools who believed that America can ignore the rest of the world and its affairs.

"Our hardships have been many, and I have no doubt that in the coming months and years we will face hardships that make those previous seem meager pittances and minor trifles. However, we b must /b endure the trials and tribulations, and we will win through to absolute victory at any cost if we are to defend the principles of justice and liberty for all.

"I now end by asking for a moment of silence for the many millions who have died this night. Good night, Good luck, and God bless America."

Around the nation, people were applauding the television sets, enthralled by the simple unbridled passion the middle-aged man could inject into his prose. His manner of speaking was one of the reasons he had received more than seventy percent of the popular vote in the presidential election of 2000, and why he was the first Senator to be elected to the Presidency in over forty years. Even though he had originally been a simple carpenter, he had a gift with words; he could weave a tapestry of emotion and imagery so perfect that one could not help but be swept away with the ebb and flow of the prose.

As soon as Martindale was off camera, Colonel Ryan Potts ran over to congratulate him on the speech.

"Great speech Kev, I almost got teary eyed up at the reference to JFK, and alluding to the Pledge of Allegiance was simply brilliant. I just hope that Congress lets us do what has to be done."

"Angels and ministers of grace defend us." Other than that, Martindale was silent and pensive for the rest of the night, hoping against hope that he had made the right decision in asking for war.

Hogwarts Castle, Scotland

0531 GMT, 29 November 2001

"Albus, we have a whole new ballgame on our hands. We simply cannot ignore the possibility that these attacks were carried out by You-Know-Who. If he is behind these, then we are dead in less than two weeks."

"Kingsly, I agree, but we must not reveal ourselves unnecessarily to the Muggles. It could spell disaster for our kind."

"Without the assistance and military forces they can provide, we won't last two months. Before this happened we had lost just about every major stronghold controlled by the Ministry or the Order, and we were getting ready to send up the white flag. If you persist in obstructing the only logical course of action, then I have no choice but to call for a vote of no confidence in your leadership."

"So it's a coup you're leading."

"I am not leading a coup. I just believe that the leadership of this organization has become ineffectual and ponderous, and I am seeking to change that with a shift in the entrenched bureaucracy."

"Kings, stop hangin' about the politicians, you talk like they do. I didn't understand a word you jus' said."

"Dung, you couldn't understand what I said even if I brought it down to your level."

"Will you three knock it off? I'm trying to take a nap before I report to Fylingdales. And why are you in my room anyway? By the way, Shacklebolt, stop working at the Ministry, you sound like a useless, feckless bureaucrat." The voice was slightly slurred and husky with sleep, but it could only belong to one person.

"Well excuse me, Mr. Potter, but I didn't realize that I was disturbing your precious sleep."

"Shacklebolt, I have a loaded .50 caliber handgun under my pillow. If you would like to meet it and have a little tête-à-tête with the bullets, then keep speaking. Otherwise, shut up and let me get more sleep." Obviously, Harry is not a morning person.

"I vote we move this into another area."

"Why should we cater to his wishes?"

"You will do as I said because I am the only one present with both a loaded gun and the willingness to use it if you do not leave, immediately."

"Good enough reason for me. 'Ow 'bout you gents?"

"I will not leave just because some brat believes he can order us about because he is the Man-Who-Lived."

At this point, Harry had lost his temper and drawn out the aforementioned pistol from underneath the pillow. In a single fluid motion, he had cocked the gun and pointed it directly at the space between Kingsley's eyeballs.

"Leave. b Now /b !"

"We're leaving! Just don't shoot!"

The acquiescent pair dragged the dissenting party out of the room quickly, and they went to what had been converted into the main meeting chamber of the Order. Within fifteen seconds of their exit, Harry was blissfully returned to dreamland.

"Kings, I think you best avoid 'im for the nex' few days."

"I quite agree with that, Mr. Shacklebolt. You are a valuable asset, and losing you would be a terrible detriment to the cause."

"Getting back on track, we must ask for international aid before we lose this war entirely. We are two steps from losing this war, and you know it. I won't act unilaterally, but it is in our best interests to reveal our existence before the sword of Damocles falls."

"Kings, Albus, I just got the official list targets that have been hit. There is no apparent pattern to the targets, but they are all quote-unquote desirable targets for what the mundane military have termed a decapitation strike. It is a strike intended to knock out all possible response to a nuclear attack or conventional invasion by eliminating the civil and military leaders of a nation. If this is the work of the Dark Lord, then it would be the perfect prelude to a full on war."

"I told you, but you just wouldn't listen. We might be on the fast track to losing this war. I think that all four of us can agree that that occurrence would be bad. Now, what the hell are we going to do about this can of worms?"

"I say we should put this matter before a committee created for the express purpose of responding to these circumstances."

"Is there any kind of action implied in that idea at all? If the action is wasting time and delaying any type of action then you are going down the right path Albus. Remember, a committee is a life form with at least three heads, and no brain."

"I have to agree with Kingsly here. Forming a committee to create a plan of future action is putting a Band-Aid on a slashed throat. We have to play it fast and loose with the rules here, and not make any plans set in stone. Right now, we have to be as fluid as water, quick as lightning and as deadly as a killing curse if we are going to survive the next few months. As a famous man once said, we have to eat lightning and crap thunder. We are on his turf now, and we need to be very bloody careful that we don't figuratively step on a landmine and royally fuck ourselves up."

"Fine. We will do as Mr. Shacklebolt has suggested and reveal our entire world to the muggles, which will affect not only those of us here in Britain, but the entire world. I leave the execution of this to you, Nymphadora, and to you Kingsly; this matter is now under your purview, and I wash my hands of the whole business."

Soon after that, representatives were selected from the elite of the order to be sent to the most important heads of state on the planet. The representatives were selected for their geniality, their ability to speak and sound both educated and civilized, and most importantly, their diplomatic abilities and their tempers. Neither Tonks nor Shacklebolt wanted to ask Harry whether he would be willing to meet with the king of Sweden, the Bundespräsident of Austria, or the President of Russia for fear of meeting the object underneath his pillow, so they sent Fletcher into Harry.

Fletcher opened the door to the bedroom as quietly as he possibly could, and ever so slowly moved to the side of the bed. He moved to gently shake Harry awake. As soon as his hands had touched Harry's shoulders, however, Harry had Fletcher's right forearm in a vice grip, and two seconds later he had broken it. Within five seconds of being touched, he had his pistol jammed against Mundungus Fletcher's left temple, ready to fire. Then, Harry woke up.

By this time, Fletcher was pleading tearfully for his measly blip of an existence to be extended past the next few seconds. Harry blinked, looked at the sidearm in his right hand, then looked at the sobbing man in front of him, and then repeated the process several times before lowering the handgun.

"I thought I told you not to wake me up by touching me the last time this happened."

As you can probably gather, he did not receive a response. In fact, as soon as he had finished speaking, Fletcher made an unconscious decision. That is to say, his body decided to go unconscious.

Now fully, and quite grumpily, awake, Harry strode to the operations center, formerly the potions classroom, where almost every day of the war was fought and planned.

"Somebody needs to go up there to tend to Dung."

"What did he do? No, wait. What did you do? You don't need to try to kill everyone who attempts to wake you up early in the mornings."

"I could debate that, but I won't. Remember how Hestia once tried to wake me up by shaking me? Right after I had gone through the MI6/SAS joint training program? Remember how she ended up?"

"Really Harry, must you attempt to shoot anyone who wakes you up? She was babbling incoherently for almost a week after that, and she still won't get within twenty feet of you."

"I was trained to defend myself even in sleep. When I broke Dung's ulna and radius, I wasn't even awake, nor was I awake when I put my gun to his temple. I did warn you not to attempt to wake me up with anything other than a bucket of ice water."

"Yes, we all know that, but time was of the essence. We did not have time to get a gallon of ice water, chill it to precisely 3.97 degrees centigrade, and carefully pour it on your head."

"Fine, I get it. You needed me immediately. What is so fucking important that man had to have his arm broken to get me down here?"

"We have selected you as a diplomatic envoy. Where would you rather go: Sweden, Austria or Russia? Before you explode, we needed to get your decision now because the envoys are going to meet with the respective heads of state at 0800 Local time in each respective time zone. You should still be able to make it to Fylingdales with plenty of time to spare."

"I am not even going to dignify that request with a response. I have neither the time nor the inclination for diplomacy. To me, diplomatic processes go something like this: Do what I say, or I shoot your brains out. Get Longbottom to do it." As he said this, he began walking out the door.

Kingsly decided to be most unhelpful and provide a quip that strengthened the currently red-haired woman's position all of none.

"You must admit, his version of diplomacy does have a very simple and persuasive argument."

Ignoring the entirely unhelpful comment, Tonks continued in her efforts. "Harry. Harry! You can't just foist this off on someone else, and besides, Neville is already on his way to Canada."

"Just watch me 'foist this off on someone else', Nymph. Now that I'm up, I might as well get my ass to the airbase and start reading up on and trying out the weapons available to us. Sayonara."

"You can't run away from your responsibilities all the time you jerk!"

From off in the distance came the faint mocking reply of "Just watch me!"

Somewhere in the United Kingdom

0612 GMT, 29 November 2001

"Lucius, do you have any information on these explosives? What are they? How do they work and how many of them are there?" As he spoke, he congratulated himself once again for ridding his speech of that annoying hiss.

He hadn't been completely insane when the puling idiot Wormtail had resurrected him, but after two years of hearing everything he spoke accented with a slurring hiss, he felt ready to sod it all and check into the Cuckoo's Nest. When Malfoy had found a spell that would rid him of the abominable sibilance, he felt like a new man. A mere two days after the spell was performed, he had managed to delude himself into thinking that he had found the spell and that everyone on the planet was in complete awe of his power and prowess.

His throne sat on a raised dais made of pure black obsidian from the area around Pompeii and Herculaneum, carved into the forms of all the demons of hell. His throne itself was made of a single black diamond, carved into the form of a monstrously beautiful seat composed of human skeletal remains. The back of the ornate seat looked as if it were made of the spinal columns of at least a hundred men and women, and the arms seemed to be made from four femurs each. At the very top of the chair was a part of the carving that looked like the body of a small child, with the mandible of the skull broken and the top punched outward, making a crown of sorts. The effect of the whole was simultaneously grotesque and breathtaking.

"I know only a little, my Lord. There are made of very certain types of metal, and they can obviously destroy entire cities in seconds. They work by an arcane art known as physics, and they somehow turn matter into other types without magic." This is where not having been brought up in a society trapped in the sixteenth century would definitely help with any sort of understanding. Well, that and having any knowledge of basic atomic theory would help immensely.

"According to my research, there are thousands of these weapons all over the world, including here in Britain. However these are all made by muggles, and are therefore inferior to anything that we could produce."

"Agreed, but can we make these bombs?"

"Whether we can or cannot is unknown at this time, although if the muggles did it, we should be able to duplicate the results with no problems."

"Good, get a team on that as soon as possible. Now how did the raids go? I expect that with the explosions, we managed to accomplish all of our goals without any casualties. Is that what happened?"

Lucius gained the classic deer in headlights look that any minion of any dictator sported when he had to disappoint the megalomaniacal despot, which quite possibly could mean the end of his privileged life.

"Umm… Ah…" He moved to a nearby door, went outside, and closed the door.

"No."

He then found the sensation of being dragged through a solid wooden door to be rather unpleasant, and in truth, it was downright painful. However, it was nothing compared to looking at one of the most hideous excuses for a human being from less than six inches away, while said persons hand are grabbing your collar in a death grip.

"I assume that I must have misheard you, Lucius. You just told me that my brilliant and utterly perfect plan failed. Did I hear you correctly?"

"Yes."

"Yes I heard you correctly, or yes you gave the incorrect response?"

"Umm… yes! No! No! I don't know! Maybe so!" This confused babbling went on for some time before the herpetologically inclined humanoid decided that he should relieve the strain on the man's brain.

"I won't kill the messenger, Lucius. I will merely maim the messenger."

Suitably reassured by this admission, Lucius calmed himself to the point where he would not hyperventilate in the middle of a sentence.

"No, they did not accomplish their goals. Military resistance was much stiffer than we had anticipated and as soon as the teams ported in, the enemy began firing on them. We suffered over eighty percent losses and accomplished nothing. Even at the suspected Order strongholds, our operations turned into bloodbaths on a scale we had never anticipated. Right now we are at thirty-eight percent strength."

"But you are doing everything in your power to rectify this mistake, are you not?"

"Yes! Yes I am! It will be rectified, I promise you!"

"Good. Now leave."

"Yes my Lord!"

Secured Facility, United States, grid reference Uniform-Sierra-four-four-seven-two-six-one-niner-Oscar-November, exact location classified above top secret

1400 GMT (8:00 AM CST), 29 November 2001

"What do you take us for, madam? Do you think we are all fools born yesterday? Magic does not exist, period. Saying that magic exists is like saying that a jolly pink marshmallow king created the planet or that Scientologists have IQs higher than thirty." Colonel Potts usually said what the President was too much of a genteel man to say, although what the Colonel used as the Presidents thoughts was often highly insulting to a great many.

"As incredible as it sounds Mr. President, it is all true. The whole shebang, the whole kit and caboodle, everything I have told you is true. Every fairy story you have ever heard has a basis in reality, and almost all of them have a beginning in the magical world. Hansel and Gretel was based off the life of a woman named Agatha Sorenson who lived in the early 1300s. She actually did eat children, but when one of the children got a hold of a wand, the child set her on fire, roasting her alive."

"Excuse me, but you could have pulled any name, date and fairytale out of your ass and made the story just as believable. Moreover, those so-called 'memories' look like they could have been shot by any motion picture crew with an adequate amount of pecuniary assets and perseverance; I mean, just look at what Spielberg did with 'Saving Private Ryan'. Thus far, I neither seen nor heard anything that would make me believe in magic.

"You, my dear, are merely an insignificant charlatan who somehow managed to get inside our defensive grids without being killed by the numerous levels of security. Now tell me who you are and who you are working for before I make the remainder of your soon to be short life a living hell." The man who spoke was Colonel Potts, a firm skeptic of that which he could not observe in action, and those that had no scientific backing.

"My name is Cho Chang, I am working for the Order of the Phoenix, and I am on a diplomatic mission to secure military aid against our common enemy. Give me five minutes, please. At the end of five minutes, if you still are not convinced, I will gladly go into your custody."

"Very well. Five minutes, starting… now."

"Ok, look at this. This is an ordinary hat-"

"And now you pull a rabbit out of it. Congratulations, you just lowered my estimate of your intelligence to that of a low-grade moron or a creationist. Any idiot who knows how to follow basic directions can do that trick, so I'll go and call the MP-"

"Potts shut up and let the woman work." While the president did respect that his chief of intelligence often obtained results in a very timely manner, he had become weary of the man's intolerance for those who had views different from his own.

"Kevin, she isn't going to do-o-o-o. How the hell did you do that?"

She turned the hat into a rabbit. From six feet away.

"I told you already, magic."

"Nice try, but David Blaine could do the exact same thing, although he would have probably done it while encased in flames. Got any other tricks to show us?"

She pointed her wand at a nearby desk and uttered i bombarda /i . Within a tenth of a second, the desk was in thousands of pieces, and the Colonel was looking much less cocky than a moment before. The President however, looked absolutely livid.

"What in hell did you do?! That desk was carved in 1864! It was one of a kind, you crazy bitch! If you don't fix it right now…" The President was rather fond of the desk that had been carved for Lincoln's second term, and he had it in a very secure place for safekeeping. Well, it should have been safe, but who counts on demonstrations of magic while selecting a safe location?

The sheer fact that he swore was incredible, and that he used foul language in front of and directed at a lady doubly so. He had been brought up as an old school southern gentlemen, kind and courteous to all with a deep sense of honor.

When Cho looked at the Colonel again, she noticed he had unsnapped the holster to his service weapon, and that his hand was hovering over it cautiously.

"Please, both of you calm down. President Martindale, the desk will be restored in perfect condition in just a few seconds. Mr. Potts, please don't threaten me. i Tabula Reparo /i ."

Before the stunned eyes of her now captive audience, the desk reassembled in whole.

"Still a skeptic?"

"That was rigged, I know it was. Magic cannot exist, no scientific evidence supports it, it is impossible." He said it with such a fanatical air that it almost sounded like a practiced mantra.

"'There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy.' You remember that I have always espoused the virtues of an open mind, and this is a situation that requires an open mind to deal with it. If you feel that you cannot deal with the new reality we seem to be facing here, then I may have no choice but to find myself a new national security advisor."

"I shall endure that which I have no control over, though I shall wish I did. I am still skeptical about the validity of the very idea that this is real in any form, but I will not abandon you over a trivial dispute such as this. I promised to stay by your side through the remainder of your tenure, and I am a man of my word."

"Good man! Now, we have let the nation now about this. Get my speechwriters on the line and tell them…"

Two hours later, the President was once again on national television, along with Miss Chang and several representatives from the American magical community. The representatives from America did not appear in any form of robes, for their society is much more integrated with its counterpart. They still kept mostly secret and very well hidden, but at least here, the flow of ideas did not stop at the cultural demarcation line.

The transcript of the president's speech follows.

"My fellow Americans… today is a day of many firsts. Today is the first time our military forces have ever been put on DEFCON 1 in response to any form of violence against America, and it is the first time that America has been subjected to the horror of a nuclear weapon. Today… is also the first time we will openly meet a previously unknown component of the great American Melting Pot, and indeed the world.

"What I am about to tell you, may seem bizarre, insane, and downright foolish. However, after seeing what I have been shown, there is no doubt in my mind that this is as real as anything under the sun is. Until now, a part of our society has felt the need to remain hidden from the vast majority, for fear of tyranny, persecution and annihilation that could probably have been enacted by the majority.

"With these most recent events, which have cost millions their lives, they have decided to ask for military aid against a supremely dangerous foe. A foe that they have not been able to gain ground upon in several years from all accounts. Until the events of last night, they were ready to throw up the white flag and sue for peace.

"With the events of last night, they came to realize that this enemy is a global concern, rather than a national concern as they had previously thought. They decided to ask for military aid from every nation on the planet that will send it, so that they might defeat the evil that they face. These people are those with magical powers.

"I know that right now a great many of you are already discounting what I have to say and are already calling me a loon, but this is for real. The people to my immediate right are some representatives from the magical world, and they will demonstrate only small part of their abilities so that you might be convinced as well. I must remind you that this is on live television, and this broadcast is not being edited or censored in any way, shape or form."

Ms. Chang was the first of the congregation to step forward, and she motioned for a target dummy to be wheeled forward. Once the dummy was in place, she fired off a demolition spell, and the dummy disintegrated before the eyes of millions of people.

Next, she gained a look of concentration and after a few seconds, her body seemed to lose definition and morph into an entirely different body shape. When the outline to her body came back, she had turned into a 12-foot long Smiledon californicus, replete with sinewy muscles, jagged claws, and seven inch long serrated teeth, like steak knives. Those closest quickly took several steps back away from the giant saber tooth cat, and for effect, she gave a mighty roar, deafening in intensity and terrifying in its message.

The flashbulbs of the still cameras almost immediately were used to their utmost, as it is not every day that one sees a young Chinese woman turn into an animal that hadn't been seen in over twenty five thousand years. After several demonstrations of the authenticity of her new form, she changed back.

Afterwards the delegation from the American community gave a more extensive demonstration of the capabilities of the magical world, notably impressing the military commanders watching the demonstrations.

"I know that this may seem like some tremendous waste of invaluable time, but it is most certainly is not. The enemy that the magical world faces is now the probable cause for the nuclear attacks, and as I said before, we will commit every possible resource to the capture and extermination of such a grave threat to world security, and I will not renege on that.

"The leader of the group that has so threatened the security of the entire planet has named himself Lord Voldemort, but his real name is Thomas Marvolo Riddle, an orphan born in 1928. In his attacks on a predominantly peaceful society, he has shown no mercy to women, children, the elderly, or to any who dare oppose him and his idea of racial purity and eugenics, which will lead to his version of a Nietzscheian superman. His motivations and goals are very simple: to eliminate, by all necessary means, the non-magical population of the world, including genocide of all undesirables and deviant aspects of society. From the accounts of his early life, we can assume that he is merely a neglected and abused orphan who decided that the best way to protect himself is to lash out at anyone he doesn't like.

"This man is the modern day equivalent to Adolf Hitler, and he will stop at nothing to see his goals accomplished, no matter how high the cost may rise in blood or money. Many of you watching and listening are too young to remember the full horror of Adolf Hitler, but if we act now we can save the world from ever having to go through such a tragedy again. The first battles of this new war have already been fought in Britain, where forces under his command attempted to eliminate the few remaining martial and civilian command structures. Due to the vigilance of the remaining British armed forces, all twelve of his attacks on military and civilian centers failed, and thanks to the vigilance of the magical portion of the population, his attacks on their command centers failed as well.

"Now that we know who are enemy is, I call upon Congress to vote for full and total war with the Dark Lord and his followers, so that we may the save the future generations of the human race from tyranny, oppression and eventual extermination. Only by completely eliminating the threat of the Dark Lord, may we be sure that his evil will not continue to fester in the shadowed corners of the world. Do not think that because the enemy has been beaten on this one night, that this war will be over quickly. This spark will set off a chain reaction of problems that will, most likely, encompass the entire world in their scope, and involve every living human being with their magnitude and severity. The road before us is long, and it is surely a difficult path that we must tread, but once we have traveled the road before us, we will know that we have made the right choice for all humanity.

"I do not wish for war, nor would I ever wish for such a terrible occurrence to befall mankind, but I now call for total war in the hopes that it will initiate a new era of peace that will last many years. We must defend our home, our livelihoods and our progeny.

"God bless America."

Within the hour, Congress had returned a unanimous vote for a declaration of war between the United States of America and the forces of Lord Voldemort. At the same time they voted unanimously voted to establish a "coalition" of nations to assist in the battle against this maleficent force opposing the good of the world.

Dreamland Air Base, Diamond Lake, 22 miles ESE of Las Vegas, 'Area 51'

1716 GMT (10:16 MST), 29 November 2001

Much of Area 51 was far beneath the surface of the earth. Only a few structures were actually above ground, such as four aircraft hangers large enough to each house a Airbus A380 with room to spare, a control tower and some buildings such as the base PX and other non-classified areas. The true heart of the base was actually a hundred feet below ground, were a hanger the size of a large international airport was safely hidden from both satellites and the occasional idiots who tried to sneak in to see some non-existant aliens.

Directly below the above ground hangers were four immense elevators that could lower the entire interior of the hangers to the main aircraft parking area. This allowed immense numbers of aircraft to be maneuvered on to the elevators, making evacuations a breeze. This also had the effect of stupefying anybody watching the base, because planes that had never arrived would routinely take off, making many watching wonder whether they b made /b the aircraft there.

Major General Patrick Shane McLanahan II had been assigned to the base known as Dreamland since the late eighties, back when he was only a captain assigned here for a single special mission. After the mission, he stuck around and eventually he had been made commander of the 500th Special Air Wing, the premier special operations branch of the Air Force. Units under his command included the first 8 Special Weapons Squadrons, the 501st Heavy Bomb Wing, the 502nd Bomb Wing, the 503rd Missile Defense Wing, the 504th, 505th and 506th Advanced War Fighter Wings.

As he walked down the line of hangers, he looked into each and saw a mix of B-2 stealth bombers, modified B-1 Lancers and several heavily modified B-52 Stratofortresses being readied for frequent use. As he passed the last hanger, an unfamiliar lieutenant ran up, holding a sheaf of papers and a 25000:1 scale map of Scotland.

"General! Fafnir has ordered a strike on these coordinates to be executed in the next twelve hours. These coordinates are in England–"

"I can read the map, thank you very much. Who is 'Fafnir', Lieutenant?

"He gave no other identification, but his authentication codes put him at the very top of the command structure."

"What do the computer files say about him?"

"Nothing, nil, zip, zilch and nada. It's as if he called from nowhere with all the proper strike codes. The only file I was able to find with Fafnir as a keyword was encrypted in a way our techs had never seen before, and it appears to be in 512-bit code."

"Whoa. I don't know much about computer systems, but that's pretty damn good, isn't it?"

"It makes the regular mil-spec top secret encrypts look like a simple crossword puzzle made for second graders. With our current computer systems and decrypt software working on it, we should be able to read the file in a few, I don't know, uh, years."

"I won't hold my breath, then."

"I'll get this to the ops center. Dismissed, Lieutenant."

He walked over the main runway towards the entrance to underground concrete bunker that housed the ops center. He descended the long winding concrete stairwell to the ops center, and the intense arid heat of the Nevada desert gradually lessened until all that was left was a near constant temperature of 65°F.

As he entered the former nuclear fallout shelter, he saw JC Powell, a long-time friend, walking down towards the base command.

"Yo, Powell! I haven't seen you in a while, how's it hanging? Where have you been man?"

"It, as you call it, hangs to the right. I was just recalled from this op in Southeast Asia. Someone by the name of Fafnir gave me a duty reassignment to the 500th Special Air Wing until further notice."

"It seems that Fafnir has been busy. He ordered the 501st to attack coordinates in southeastern Wales, and I heard from Rickenbacker that he tried to gain control of NORAD last night. Anyway, what do think of the recent events in the world?"

"They will have a positive outcome."

"Positive? A hundred million people are dead, and you say this will have a positive effect? Would you mind explaining just how the effect on the world will be positive?"

"Not at all. Most of the world is now unified against a single enemy, which can only have positive effect on the relations between nations. In light of the danger to their individual sovereignties, nations who were fighting before have now put aside their differences to unite against a common enemy, which will strengthen their cordial relations considerably. For example, take the situation in the Middle East: two days ago, the Syrians were threatening to invade Lebanon, and the Iraqis were pretty steamed at the Israelis. Now, Israel and Iraq are cooperating as if they have always been the best of friends, the Syrians and Lebanese are reconciled, and all four of them have joined with Saudi Arabia in stating that none of them will ever join the Dark Dork."

"Great. Are you going to be running interference on the upcoming strike?"

"You know it. I'll be in a Cheetah."

"No shit? You are one lucky duck; the Cheetah is an incredible aircraft. It can make it above Mach one point five without 'burners, right?"

"That's right, and it can also carry twice the payload of an unaltered F-15E without any real increase in weight or any significant change to the flight dynamics. The changes the techs have been able to make from the first version are fantastic; over eighty percent of the airframe is now a lightweight plastic polymer with the same tensile strength of titanium alloy. The engines -"

Patrick knew how carried away Powell could get with his aircraft, so he cut him off for times sake. "Cool. Hey, I'll talk to you later; I have to get the 501st ready to fly, and Joey Travone wanted me to swing by his armory later."

"Catch you later."

He moved down to the large steel door that protected the base operations center, the hub of all official military duties for the base and surrounding area. As he entered, he noticed his wife, Wendy McLanahan née Tork at one of the communication control stations.

"Wendy, I thought you were watching Bradley today."

"My mother is watching him. I got a call that I'll be on duty from now on, and that everybody is being put on deck."

"Fine, it's out of our hands. Try to get Dave Luger over to the armory; I have a feeling we might be going on quite a few ground missions in the next few days."

"I'll try but he's been unreachable for most of the day."

"Look under Spunky McFarlane III, it's the name he registered an emergency line under. If all else fails to contact him that line will always get through, either to his home or his satellite phone."

"O-okay." She would tease Mr. Luger mercilessly with the name Spunky McFarlane in the near future.

He dropped the papers he had been given, along with the map, off at the planning station for the personnel there to flesh out workable plans of action.

From there he headed to the armory to look over some of the new toys they have been given to play with. He knew more than anyone did the benefits that experimental technology can have when used in a battle type situation, having used many experimental weapons and aircraft to great effect.

"Hey Joey. What do you have for me today?"

"I know you're going to love this, Patrick. Follow me to bay 1."

In bay one was something that looked like a very long, quite thick surfboard with a large dome near the front. When one looked closely, one could just make out the air intakes for the twin pulse-detonation engines.

"So what, it doesn't look any different than any other UCAV we've used before. What's so special about this?"

"This has twin Pratt & Whitney pulse detonation engines, mission adaptive flow control on every surface and twelve permanent gun systems. It can carry almost thirteen tons of any conceivable type of armament, including nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and its top speed is over Mach 2.2. This drone has almost a zero turning radius, an ELINT suite that would make the NSA drool and best of all: it is very cheap to produce and easy to make. It can carry out just about every mission a manned aircraft can, and it doesn't matter if it is shot down, because we can always make another."

"This is better than the NightHawk?"

"Compared to this, the NightHawk is a stone club. This aircraft is so stealth, our own radars can barely pick it up, and it is a V/STOL capable aircraft."

"Awesome. What about infantry protection?"

"We just got these next items in early this morning. These are the first true powered exoskeletons in use by the United States military, called the Cybernetic Infantry Device, or CID for short. They are voice activated, with the newest motion control systems available, and they make a single man more powerful than an entire platoon. The suit multiplies a user's strength by almost fifteen times, protects the user from all known biochemical weapons, and can even be used as a substitute for a radiological protection suit."

"It's a box, Joey."

The box looked to be about four feet long and wide, and about four and a half feet tall. The outer layer looked like some kind of plastic.

"Try picking it up with the handles on the side."

The general moved to the side of the box as instructed, and prepared to lift the supposedly light box with a mighty heave.

"Gah! Jesus fucking Christ, I think just dislocated my shoulder. That thing has to weigh at least eighty pounds." Joey was not sympathetic. In fact, he was guffawing so hard that he had to catch his breath.

"Yes, very funny, Joey. Now why does that box weigh so much corporal?"

"Patrick, I'm a major."

"Not if you pull a stunt like that ever again."

"Sorry, I thought you had a sense of humor. Well watch this. CID One, activate."

At that command, the alleged box began to unfold, revealing a robot with very intimidating features. The 'head' of the exoskeleton looked like a deformed insect human hybrid, with no discernable mouth, ears or eyes. There were several parts that were obviously fish-eye camera lenses, and once the top of the head was clear of obstruction, several small antennae extended to begin receiving and interpreting radio signals. The head made a complete 360° rotation as part of the standard start up procedure, and as the hands unfolded, Patrick noticed that each finger ended in a single gleaming point that looked like it could puncture reinforced steel. Actually, the claws on the fingers could pierce an inch of titanium alloy with little difficulty.

The exoskeleton continued to unfold, and once it was finished, it stood at more than ten feet tall. McLanahan had heard about how to operate one of these things, so he stepped up to the motionless exoskeleton and called out, "Pilot up!"

He waited.

And waited.

Finally, he was fed up with waiting.

"Joey, how come this damn robot doesn't do what I tell it to?"

"You have to precede commands with its name for the first few times before it will automatically recognize your voice. Like this: CID One, pilot up."

The exo kneeled, and the back panels of the exo split and opened for the general to step inside. As he did this, Joey donned a small electronic device that looked like a Bluetooth headset.

It was a snug fit, but once the back closed, he almost forgot about it being a little uncomfortable. As soon as the hatch closed, it was as if he wasn't in a giant exoskeleton at all, but merely in his own body. The synaptic controls noticed the minute signals running through his nerves and the moved the corresponding part of the exosuit, creating an instantaneous harmony of thought and motion. McLanahan quickly got used to the control systems of the CID; this included the way the different functions of the exo could be accessed by menus he opened by looking at specific icons for.

"Take her for a spin around the track, running at full speed. You'll love the results, I guarantee it."

Thus far, the general had been dutifully impressed with all that he had been shown, so he decided to do as Joey suggested. Once he was moving as fast as he could go, he radioed back to the controller.

"Yo, Joe! I'm moving, now where are these results you promised?"

"Look at your speedometer."

"57.12 miles per hour… Jesus. I am impressed Joey. What model did you say this was?"

"CID One, sub-designation CID Basic, Equilibrium Incorporated Model no. 04-221-0AQ, Mk I. The shipping schedule says they have two more models of these things coming out in the next two months, with even more enhanced capabilities. Don't think that just speed and some claws are the only weapons on this exo. Give the command, 'slice and dice mode, activate'."

As soon as the words had left Patrick's mouth, noticed a small text box on the wraparound OLED screen that said, 'blades deploying, please wait…' He looked at the outer arms of the exosuit and he saw two eight and ¾ inch long blades, one of either of his forearms, and the computer readout showed that he had 10 very menacing looking spikes coming out of the back panels.

"Those blades have been sharpened by computer controlled lasers to only a molecule at the very edges, and they are made out of a poly-metallic alloy identified as M3417, which is several orders of magnitude harder than diamonds. The blades can slice through almost any substance on the planet, so please, be careful with in close quarter with friendlies. To retract the blades, simply give the command, 'slice and dice mode, deactivate'. Our final stop on the tour of the CID operating systems is the attachable weapons modules."

"You mean there's more this suit can do?"

"Ohhh, yeah. This exoskeleton was designed to make the US Army the strongest fighting force on the planet, while still having a relatively small number of personnel. The first module I will attach is the flamethrower. When fired, the fuel will travel from the external tank, through the fuel lines, and to the variable flow rate nozzles that attach to the forearm of the dominant arm. The fuel burns at about 2400 °F, so it will incinerate just about everything it touches, so once again, be careful using the flamethrower in close quarters with friendlies nearby. Try out the flamer on the target range I set up over there."

Patrick moved to the indicated target range and pointed his right arm towards a deactivated M113, and he whispered the word 'fire'. A tremendously bright light engulfed the armored personnel carrier, and before Patrick's very eyes, the aluminum armor began to melt and deform into a molten pool. Before very long, the small amount of diesel fuel in the engines exploded, taking the rest of the APC with it.

Next, he moved to an old T-38 Talon jet trainer, and he whispered the word fire once again. Within less than three seconds, the cockpit glass had begun to soften, the control surfaces on the wings and tail began to fuse from the heat, and the thin aluminum skin began to drip off the internal steel framework. Soon even the steel frame softened and collapsed under its own weight, leaving only a pile of twisted metal as the only memorial to what was once an aircraft.

"Good lord this thing is powerful."

"I still have one more weapon add-on to show you. A double 40-millimeter grenade launcher with 140 grenades ready to go is the final thing I have to show in the infantry weapons."

The change-out from the flamer to the grenade launcher took less than a minute, and the weight of the large metallic canisters on his back was barely noticeable. As soon as the canisters locked in, he heard a faint whirr and picture of a 40 millimeter round came up displaying data that identified the rounds loaded as M923 practice rounds, which had the same ballistics as regular frag ammunition.

"The rounds are automatically sorted by your suit's weapon recognition systems. Right now, they are all practice rounds, so try them out on range three. Targeting is controlled with your sight line, so just look at your intended target, and the computer will make the necessary adjustments to the elevation and azimuth of the barrels."

On range three, Patrick knew he had found a favorite off duty toy. Every shot was dead on target, off his actual target by only a few centimeters, and the computer even gave him suggestions where the round would do the most damage to each individual target. It was clear that whoever wielded this system on the battlefield would be damn near invincible, and would rule at reconnaissance missions.

"Okay Patrick, time to bring it in."

Dismounting was as simple as it was to get in, and when he ordered it to deactivate, he watched in awe of the tool he had just taken for a test drive.

"One last thing to show you, it's the new flight suits that will be available to all the Air Force in the next six months."

They walked over to an all-around garment display case, which contained a suit that seemed to be completely black. The garment covered the silver body of the faceless mannequin from the feet to the forehead, with a large area for the face cut out of the cloth. Every part of the body was covered, including the entirety of the hands, the wrists, the ankles, the neck and most of the head, making for a very sleek effect.

"A demonstration has been set up over here, and I know you'll like this."

On a stand some distance away, one of the new flight suits was on a foam dummy, and pointed at the dummy was a quadruple 23-millimeter anti-aircraft gun, ready and waiting to fire. The dummy was held in place by a three inch thick, seven-foot tall steel pole, and one of the practical jokers in the Quartermaster Company had stuck a cigarette in the foam where the mouth would be. It reminded Patrick of an execution scene in a clichéd spy movie.

"Shooting downrange on range five! Fire in the hole!"

The noise was deafening, and one could tell that live rounds had been loaded into the gun because the Plexiglas behind the dummy was already badly cracked and looked ready to shatter. After fifteen seconds of firing, Joey signaled the operator to stop, and as soon as the last bullet had been fired, he and the general jogged up to the dummy. What Patrick saw was simply amazing.

Not even a single round had penetrated the fabric, and the fabric still looked brand new.

"What is this stuff?"

"That stuff is a carbon nanofiber weave in twelve separate layers with an inner layer of synthetic cotton for comfort. According to the lab reports from the guys at Equilibrium, this suit will stop anything up to a .50 caliber round at point blank range, and 57-millimeter rounds at expected combat distances. This was a test with rounds altered to simulate fire from 3000 feet. I would say it passed."

"How many of those do you have in stock? Tell me!"

"Calm down, we have enough in stock for every member of the flight crews to have two. These were designed to be resistant to most forms of wear and tear, along with the ability to remain relatively clean for weeks on end, even with constant usage. They are one size fits all, elastic and they breath just like cotton fabric so they can serve as regular clothing as well. They're machine washable and the techs recommend that we use Tide, because other detergents degrade the structural integrity or something like that."

"Good to know. Oh shit, is it one o'clock already? I was supposed to be in a conference with Jumper fifteen minutes ago. Joey, if you happen to see Dave Luger, show him what you showed me."

"Roger that, Patrick. See you later."

One hour later, the calls for the 501st Heavies to go wheels up went out, and two dozen EB-52 Megafortresses lifted off from the quiet of the Nevada desert. Once again, the few ardent nutcases who managed to get close to the base saw aircraft that had never arrived take off, causing yet another rash of underground speculations of aliens and evil government conspiracies to arise.

The planes flew swift and silent, many speeding to their doom.

Twelve thousand feet above a Scottish moor, British Isles

2341 GMT, 29 November 2001

"Bobtail Lead, this is Overwatch 1. Are you sure that there are troops at the coordinates we received? We can't see anything down there, over."

"Overwatch, I am sure that there are troops and vehicles at that location. The latest satellite images confirm that fact. I am sending them to you now, over."

"Roger, we have received the transmission. There they are! We just started picking them up. We are not receiving any radio signals from the area, and our visual scans aren't picking up anything. The infrared scanner and ultraviolet bands pick them up clear as day, over."

"Hey Patrick, do you want me to do a flyby to get a better idea of what's down there?"

"Powell, you keep your ass up here. And Tivoli, don't you even think of going down there either. You are our first line of defense; without you, we're sitting ducks."

"Okay, okay, Jesus, it was just a suggestion."

The 501st had been flying for just over seven hours, and they were all ready for some action.

"General, this is Overwatch 1-1; you are coming in range of their targeting radars. I am picking up emissions in bands A, B, C, F, G, and X, along with some laser tracks. We believe they have not picked you up yet, over."

"ISAR has identified the key units in the formations, may we fire?"

"Are we within firing range of most of our weapons?"

"Yes sir."

"Fire away, then."

As soon as the wing opened their bomb bay doors, their radar signatures increased exponentially, and several large blips appeared on the radar screens below. However, at the exact moment the doors opened, the surface to air missile launchers on the ground launched several volleys of missiles at the incoming bombers. With the bomb doors open, they were easy targets to acquire and home in on.

"Bobtail this is Overwatch 1-2! We have just picked up several high speed contacts moving to your position. I recommend that you get out of there."

"This is Overwatch; missiles identified as being of the SA-3 Goa, SA-11 Gadfly and SA-5 Gammon former Soviet designs. Maximum speed of the missiles is Mach 4.3, and expected impact is in 42 seconds. You are to deploy countermeasures, but do not deviate from the path to target."

"Bobtail flight, this is lead, launch flares and chaff. Shake those missiles any way you can."

"Estimating 30 seconds to impact."

"Lead, this is Bobtail 2-2; none of our countermeasures are working! Our staff is giving no response and we can't direct the plane. Diagnostics show zero pressure in the hydraulic system, and fuel is at three-niner-zero-one-one pounds and falling fast."

"Bobtail 2-2, eject now, we'll relay your position to the British Army so they can pick you up. Forget about the plane, your lives are more important."

"Time to impact is now fifteen seconds. Bobtail 2-2 crew has bailed out, and LADAR sees them heading towards the enemy camp. We have sent the projected landing point coordinates to the RAF liaison; she will relay it to the appropriate commanders."

"None of the countermeasures are having any effect. They're gonna hit!"

"Five, four, three, two, one, impact!"

The proximity warheads on the missiles detonated when the radar signals told them they were within fifty meters of the aircraft, giving very little room for maneuver. Most of the missiles slammed directly into the cockpits or into the fuselages of the bombers, and the few that didn't destroy the aircraft outright disabled at least two of the four engines.

The two heavy bombers on the immediate left and right of the lead exploded with frightful violence, the explosives in their weapons bays igniting into tremendous fireballs that consumed the whole of their respective aircraft.

"Sir, planes 4 through 13 got it right in the cockpits, and the rest are so badly damaged, they'll have to ditch over the ocean. We have to get out of here. This was a trap, and a well planned one at that."

"Roger that. Bobtail flight hook right, do an about face and go full speed away. I say we cut our losses."

Just then, an altered voice came over the radio. The voice was deep and light, dark and bright, gravely and smooth, and dozen other contradictions all at once, making it impossible to tell whether the speaker was young or old, or male or female.

"McLanahan, this is Fafnir. You are not to leave without firing at least one weapon. Bobtail flight, disregard your last orders and complete the mission as fragged at all costs."

"Fuck that, I'm not staying here any longer. We have effectively lost ninety percent of the wing, and I say it's time to leave. Bobtail, head for home and disregard all orders given by the one known as Fafnir."

"McLanahan, you are in violation of UCMJ provision number 1534–"

McLanahan then decided that he wasn't going to listen to any military law bullshit, and he turned a knob on the radio, switching to a wing only net.

"I never liked that station anyway. Bobtail, we are heading for home. Overwatch, call Gascan and set up a refuel point."

"Roger. We have a message for you from Fafnir; apparently you're going to get to know the stockade very well once you get back."

"Nothing new. This is Bobtail Lead, over and out."


	3. The Gathering Armies

A/N: I would like to thank all those who have reviewed my work. Your feedback helps me gain inspiration to continue writing. I would love more reviews to tell me how I'm doing

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The Gathering of Armies

Day 2

Somewhere in the United Kingdom

0214 GMT, 30 November 2001

The creature branded as Lord Voldemort was reveling in his triumph of the American bombers, and said that it showed his superiority of the muggles. There was another rationale as to why he was triumphant; he had presently received word that the lion's share of the Dragons would fight on his side. He received this news through his adherent Severus Snape, who in his obligation as a double agent had stopped by the Order HQ and relayed the same information to them as well. This intelligence caused numerous different responses from both groups; in the Dark Lord's camp, this meant that now they had an almost indestructible ally, but in the Order HQ, this caused mass pandemonium as dragons are notoriously challenging to kill and there were thousands of them in the wild.

_USS Valhalla_ formerly the _Red October_, in the Baltic Sea

0341 GMT, 30 November 2001

Commander Marko Ramius ordered the submarine to periscope depth in order to pick up new orders after being on the bottom of the ocean floor for the past week. Instead of the accustomed 'return to port' orders he was anticipating, he received a FLASH message ordering to maintain missile release depth, radio silence and immediate launch readiness. His first impulse was to ask his superiors why, and he was informed of the proceedings of the past 24 hours. His sub was the only one on station with an ELINT (**El**ectronic **Int**elligence) suite accessible. He was to be on red alert, with his missiles prepared to fly in seconds if need be. He had not been this apprehensive since running his sub across the Atlantic Ocean avoiding both the Red Fleet and the US Navy. From then on, he would sleep no more than six hours a night.

SSN 21 _Seawolf_, Somewhere in the Adriatic Sea

0403 GMT, 30 November 2001

The ELINT systems aboard the _Seawolf_ were lit up reminiscent of Las Vegas at nighttime. The radar showed hundreds of bogeys flying toward the Italian coastline. The sub had already lost contact with its escorts, the _Ticonderoga_ class cruiser _Port Royal_ and the _Oliver Hazard Perry_ class frigates _Reuben James_ and _Ingraham_. The last communication heard from the cruiser was something about dragons attacking the SPY-1B radar. Then the sonar stations picked up the sound of an old, Russian _Alfa_-class submarine. The next thing that anybody knew there were several torpedoes in the water and all of them were making a beeline towards the _Seawolf_. Although the crew was quick to respond, the torpedoes were quicker. All 349 sailors and SEALs onboard died in battle, but not before getting a warning out to the Allied Air Command of the impending assault. This forewarning saved thousands of lives all around the Italian peninsula.

Venice, Italy

0421 GMT (0521 Local), 30 November 2001

The canals of Venice were empty in the early pre-dawn hours, but on every street corner, you could see a Guardia Nazionale soldier with a Stinger AA missile pack nearby. The first dragons began the attack runs at 0422, shooting out jets of flame at anything in their path. The Stinger missiles took out most of the first wave but the second came so quickly that there was no time to reload the man-portable missile launchers. Fortunately, the Allied Air Command had their own kind of dragon in the air. The 503rd Squadron 1st flight was composed of customized B-52 bombers. These AL-52 Dragons fought not with missiles but with formidable onboard lasers that could slice through 18 inches of solid steel from 40 miles away. After only 20 minutes of firing from a protected position 35 miles, NE of Venice the entire northern strike force of the Dark Lord looked like it had come off worse in a fight with a nuclear weapon. Out of 179 dragons, only four were still breathing at dawn.

Rome, Italy

0452 GMT (0552 Local), 30 November 2001

Although the defenses around the Italian capital had been said to be airtight, the one thing the military planners never counted on were traitors and saboteurs. Dark Lord partisans all around the city knocked out huge sectors of the AA emplacements all at the same time. When the dragons flew in like winged harbingers of catastrophic doom, they encountered sparse resistance from the city defenses. The aerial assault joined with a massive ground attack, and ended up destroying nearly a third of the city and over 40000 lives. By the time allied ground and air units responded, the majority of the attackers had disappeared in the night and the whole of the Italian command been annihilated off the face of the earth. This only strengthened the Italians resolve to overcome the fiend who had controlled this appalling onslaught.

Hogwarts Castle, Scotland, the British Isles

0630 GMT, 30 November 2001

The war had been going badly for the Order of the Phoenix. The man named Harry Potter lamented the people he had loved and lost. Ginny had defected to the Dark Lord early on in the war and now she was as fanatical as Bellatrix Lestrange was before Harry had killed her. Ron had also tried to defect after Hermione had rejected his 'romantic' advances, but he accidentally stepped on a land mine while trying to escape. Hermione had been working as a healer on the graveyard shift at St. Mungo's at the time of the nuclear barrage. Many more had been lost to either a curse or the inescapable nuclear fires. Now was Harry's first chance to payback the creature responsible for his pain. Today the Order began a series of hit and run attacks utilizing the equipment the Americans had sent over, along with the military hardware of the American SpecOps. As he stepped into his cybernetic battle suit his face showed a sense of grim determination to never forget the horrors of the war he already had and was about to see. Moreover, as he headed out to the transport that would take him and others to the first target he resolved never back down from this or any other battle that would be joined in the name of freedom.

Fifteen miles NW of Amsterdam, Holland

0712 GMT (8:12 AM Local), 30 November 2001.

As the transport aircraft neared the destination, many of the occupants began to get cold feet about doing this first, crucial mission. At this point, only the elite strike teams were outfitted with CID battle armor systems, all the rest were in their battle robes. The people in the battle armor were busy fitting on the weapon pods that attached to their battle armor, so all those in plain robes could do was sit and agonize about their fates in the upcoming battle. At 0718 the transport landed and the troops inside left the armored tilt-rotor aircraft. However, as the Osprey lifted off to return home an Anti-aircraft missile struck it directly in the pilot's compartment and it crashed and burned. Grimly, the small attack force started moving toward the National Parliament building, since Holland had for some ungodly reason openly sided with the Dark Lord. The primary objective of this mission was to eliminate any hostile presence from the government of Holland.

As the elite squad, Squad Alpha, moved forward in their heavily armored battle suits, they encountered heavy resistance from both wizards and the military. Most of the spells bounced right off and soon the enemy was in range of the CID weapon systems. The first one to open fire was Larry Hovis with his 40mm grenade launcher, and this caused massive devastation to the enemy. After that, every single CID unit was spewing forth a great stream of tracers, bullets and frag grenades. Unfortunately, 3 of the elite squad were lost to lucky hits from small arms fire and Claymore mines. Then Harry Potter, squad leader ran through the hailstorm of bullets, at a suit-enhanced 50 mph, to start hand-to-claw fighting. Many followed him and soon the exterior defensive force that the enemy had produced was choking to death on their own blood.

Following that, Squad Bravo the regulars, ran forward to the entrance of the Parliament building. The enemy set of some explosive charges that buried squad Bravo in rubble. The entire fire team knew that all the members of the Dutch parliament were still inside because no helicopters had lifted off from the pad near the building. After the explosions, squad Alpha quickly dug out 2nd squad from the rubble, but almost half of the squad had been killed by falling debris. The demolitions expert on the team, Larry Hovis, quickly placed several charges of C4 on the steel doorways. After the doors had been blown in, the rest of the job was easy, as nobody had anticipated any strike force to be able to infiltrate the outer defensive force. After all the primary objectives had been achieved, the team used the available military CH-47 Chinook transport helicopters to extract themselves to allied Germany.

Allied Ground Forces Command, Moscow, Russia.

0923 GMT (12:23 PM Local), 30 November 2001.

The foremost reports of the successful missions in Holland and Venice were just coming in, as were reports of the devastation of Rome, Athens, and Budapest. Reactions to the reports were diverse but one thing was clear; there was a clear-cut need for a more sophisticated early warning system. Then one of the most disconcerting news flashes ever heard of was reported on CNN: there had been an authenticated epidemic of smallpox at the Ankara Int'l Airport. The pandemic was already hours old so now there was almost no chance of containing or stopping it. Before long, suspected cases of smallpox in Germany, France, India and Japan began cropping up. It looked like there was another new weapon in this conflict and it was equally imperceptible and lethal.

CIS Konovalov, Juliet II class SSBN, in the Artic Ocean

1024 GMT, 30 November 2001

The sub crew was edgy, they had been awake for 36 hours and the lack of sleep was getting to them. The submarine they were in was more then 30 years old and as such had no ELINT systems aboard. When the crew got the order to launch their missiles at new targets, they had no way to authenticate the message. When the commander of the Konovalov tried to dissuade the crew from launching the 4 nuclear missiles, a man by the name of Antonin Dolohov led a mutiny. Soon after this mutiny, the missiles began their maiden flights toward the continents of Europe and Asia. The new target coordinates for the missiles put them squarely in the capitals of China, France, Spain and India.

SAC-NORAD Headquarters, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, USA

1025 GMT (3:25 AM Local), 30 November 2001

Since the initial nuclear strikes the Strategic Air Command was on 24/7 alert. Therefore, when the missile launch signatures of the Konovalov's showed up and the vectors were confirmed, the response was very quick. Three AL-52 Dragon Laserplanes were hastily scrambled from an airstrip in northern Sweden and were able to destroy three of the four missiles. The one missile that got away was the one headed toward Beijing, China. The Chinese high command quickly notified local authorities and this saved millions of lives. By the time, the missile detonated above Tiananmen Square nearly an hour later only six million people had been caught out of fallout shelters, as an alternative to the 17 million of an uninformed city. After collaborating with the Russian High Command, the source of the missile launches, quickly confirmed to be the Konovalov was to be consequently eliminated as quickly as feasible.

Situation Room, White House, Washington DC

1200 GMT (7:00 AM Local), 30 November 2001

The NSC had convened for a special meeting with the commander in chief of the Order of the Phoenix, Harrison James Potter. The meeting was held so that the Order could relay the next moves of the Allied military forces on to its component parts throughout most of Eastern Europe. The next move for the Allied Command would be to eradicate the threat of the dragons under the control of Voldemort. Several satellite and drone passes had revealed most of the nests, and the next move was to wipe them out. In the end, the safest option to all involved was a surgical nuclear strike, and Harry accepted after some protestations. One of the men most strongly against this plan was the Secretary of State, Robert Heinlein. He was more concerned with the environmental consequences than anything else was concerned. Nevertheless, despite his protests the plan was given the green light. At 8:15 AM Eastern Standard Time, that day, America would use nuclear weapons in anger for the third time in its history. A single MX Peacekeeper missile launched from eastern Maine, and carried within its titanium casing lay the death of hundreds of dragons, and as Secretary Heinlein feared, the death of thousands of people lay within as well.

DreamWorks AFB, Diamond Lake, Nevada

1345 GMT (6:45 AM Local), 30 November 2001

After the catastrophic shoot-and-scoot mission over England, The 501st squadron was placed on Status zero-zero alert by the Air Force Chief of Staff. In other words, they were on administrative review and both the planes and the personnel became officially grounded from all flight missions as of 0600 MST. However, to Major General Patrick McLanahan this meant absolutely nothing more then the missions they would fly would most definitely not be officially sanctioned events. Patrick had already called up Jon Masters and asked him to put some of his NIRTSat constellations in orbit above Europe. NIRTSat stands for Need It Right This Second satellites, and they could do things that any normal spy satellite could only dream of doing. They can provide any battlefield commander with more useful information then a dozen regular satellites could. Moreover, right now they were watching several plumes of radioactive ash move slowly across Eastern Europe.

Just then, the intruder alarm sounded, and the internal defense systems came online. The whole base went into a total lockdown, which meant that nothing lager than .02 microns could get in or out of the building. The defense computer swiftly found the source of the alarm, Research Laboratory 1, and isolated the lockdown to that section of the building. The computers then activated an EM pulse signal scrambler, to stop any form of electronic communication from within the building. Unbeknownst to the military this technology also stops all magical forms of travel and gives the one trying to get in or out an excruciating headache. The security detail sent to secure the lab, quickly found the cause of the ruckus. Somebody had portkeyed an extremely powerful explosive in to the lab. They were obviously hoping that by the time anyone found the charge it would be too late to defuse the bomb and it would cause massive, possibly irreparable damage to the base. Thankfully, the bomb was defused well before the timer on it ran out. Then somebody asked the $64,000 question: who leaked the location of this supposedly top-secret base?

Soon after these events occurred, the modified B-1B Lancers began loading fuel and ammo for a mission that would reduce pressure on the troops in the Korean peninsula. Kim-Jong II had openly sided with the Dark Lord and praised his guiding principle of racial hygiene. He had mobilized the whole of the North Korean military in an attempt to overrun nations sympathetic to the Order of the Phoenix. His first target was obvious to most of the world, South Korea. Only four hours after receiving the Orders envoy, he ordered his troops across the DMZ. He even went so far as to claim to be able to take over the United States with his People's Liberation Army. South Korea had swiftly requested assistance to dispatch this foe of freedom. Thus, the 502nd Lancer squadron's flight status was restored for missions over the Korean peninsula. All the men and women of the 502nd squadron could see that this would be a long and bloody war with two great armies at the centerpiece of it all.


	4. Spinters of a Planet

A/N: I would like to thank Elensaa, Shaggy and all others who reviewed. I write because you encourage me to continue this work. For a disclaimer see the prologue. I appreciate all constructive reviews. Moreover, I will respond to each in some way. My policy is to roast all flamers with the very flames they send.

Splinters of a planet

Presidential Palace, Paris, France.

1730 GMT (6:30 PM Local), 30 November 2001

The leaders of fifteen countries gathered to discuss the next course of action they would take and the ramifications of the war so far. These countries were England, France, Russia, Germany, China, Japan, the United States, Italy, Greece, India, Egypt, Turkey, Spain, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. Right from the get-go, the various heads of state could tell this would be a very unpleasant meeting to say the least. The first order of business was to thrash out the financial ramifications of the nuclear attacks, and it was not at all an appealing picture. First estimates said that at the very least eighty percent of the world financial system or eight-and-a-half trillion US dollars had been lost in the initial attacks. However, with the destruction of Beijing came the true coup d'etat, as almost ninety percent of the remaining economy went through and was destroyed there. The world economy would be extremely fortunate if it recovered to its previous level in a century and not in two. Officially, all of this meant that no country on the planet could even afford to run basic services, such as heating, electricity and water with prices at their previous levels. Finally, the major nations agreed that for the time being all capitalist functions needed to be suspended.

The next item on the agenda was the current logistical situation. The effects of the nuclear detonations caused more then just physical damage. The electromagnetic pulses from the warheads knocked out nearly three dozen satellites of various types, including civilian telecommunication, military telecommunication, GPS, NAVSAT and photographic intelligence. This created a tremendous snarl-up in even the most basic communications on both landline and cellular phones and the internet. Most of the electronics on the French coast looked like a graveyard; every single circuit was dead, as a direct result of the attacks. Now there were huge gaps in lines of communication all over Europe, New England and most recently China, and as such, any new intelligence would take several hours to verify and act upon said information.

After this, the most recent body count from the United States, Britain and China was given, and this did absolutely nothing to lift the mood. Including all battle deaths, the total came to almost 100 million dead and over 300,000 wounded. The French president brought up the idea of peace talks, but following some 'spirited debate', he swiftly withdrew the proposal. Then the military portion of the meeting got underway and in a 14-1 vote, France was told to mobilize troops and move them across the Dutch border. Germany soon after began moving troops into Denmark in support of the government there, which was under attack from rebellious magical forces that support the Dark Lord. Britain went into a state of near draconian martial law, and focused on getting their country under control. Also decided at this meeting was to adopt a policy of 'if you are not for us, you are against us.' Representatives from 60 smaller countries all got various projects and orders that the militaries of their respective countries would complete. After three hours, the meeting adjourned and within an hour of the meeting's end, the United States began loading military hardware on to C-5B Galaxy transports that would ship their deadly payloads across the globe.

Sao Paulo, Brazil.

2245 GMT (7:45 PM Local), 30 November 2001

The effects of the war seemed so far away from Sao Paulo that many thought that the fighting would not get within a hundred miles of the country. The police forces in the warm city were prone to look the other way at noticeable crimes if just for a few more pesos in their pockets. For years, the Dark Lord had been paying the Brazilian authorities to 'misplace' shipments of drugs that funded his war operations. Now that the war was open to the public as it were, he now was paying the authorities to act as hired guns in support of his raids. Tonight would mark the beginning of a true world war, the likes of which the world has never seen, for tonight the Brazilian government would fall and replaced by a puppet state much like Vichy France.

The first indication that anything was abnormal that night was when all the radio and television stations went into emergency broadcast modes. Then the lights went out and the city began tearing itself apart. Several resistance groups reacted with incredible violence toward the rebellious magic users and corrupt security forces. Often times the opposing forces fought tooth and nail to gain naught but ten meters. However, slowly, ever so slowly, the dark side gained the upper hand, and meter by bloody meter, they closed in on their ultimate goal, the governmental district of the city. However, just as they main force of the enemy reached the gates of the district, the freedom fighters detonated hundreds of charges of C4 placed all around the approaches to the district, trapping the enemy forces with mountains of debris. After that, it was no longer a battle, but a slaughter, as almost instantaneously the resistance began firing grenades, RPGs, and bazookas into the conglomeration of enemies killing dozens at one time. As for the few wizards and witches who survived, their fates were sealed. Turned over to US custody for questioning and eradication, they would live out the remainder of their lives on death row, with no appeals.

Central Alaska Nuclear Power Station, 240 mi. WNW of Nome.

2334 GMT (2:34 PM Local), 30 November 2001

The men of the National Guard who guarded the massive nuclear power plant against terrorists knew the importance of their duty. The thirteen reactors they guarded supplied power to the whole of Alaska and most of northern Canada. However, not only did these men guard the reactors and the cooling towers, but they also maintained the last Backscatter radar array on the planet. The Backscatter array, or known formally as the OTH-BS system (Over the Horizon, Back Scatter), was designed and built in the mid 1970s to monitor the launch of strategic bombers from Russian airbases that were otherwise impossible to view with normal radar. The original plans called for six backscatter arrays placed around the North American continent, but prohibitive costs stopped construction on arrays Delta, Echo and Foxtrot and arrays Bravo and Charlie converted into civilian uses. Array Alpha, due to budget cuts, had been shut down and was kept in yellow, or storage condition.

As technicians scurried around the control boxes of the array, many in the guard detail felt uneasy, as if they were on the edge of an immense cliff with unstable ground beneath them. All of them were jumpy, as their company leader had informed them of the ease with which the magic users could travel. When a blast sounded from the far left of the squad, the whole team opened fire, but they hit nothing but snow. While their attention had been drawn to right, a group of Death Eaters, in the signature regalia began the attack. Within seconds, half the squad was down, and the other half fought valiantly but soon both the security force and the techs were dead, along with six robed figures. Moreover, in the wake of the enemy strike team there were smoldering pieces of what had once been the most advanced radar station on the planet.

Day 3

SAC-NORAD Command, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

0004 GMT, 1 December 2001 (5:04 PM MST, 30 November 2001)

The furor of the first days of the war had died down and most of the northern hemisphere was calm, for the moment. As they had been for the past two days, the view screens covering the British Isles were blank. There seemed to be a flurry of activity in Brazil with almost a quarter of the country outlined in red, signifying territory in hostile possession. The situation around Korea was getting worse by the minute, as North Korean troops began invading the western coast of Japan. The destruction of Beijing had opened up a gigantic assortment of problems, as now any ambitious provincial military commander could proclaim himself as a king of his own sovereign nation-state. Almost half of these military commanders either sympathized with the dark lord or out-and-out supported him and his practices.

Now China had almost stopped being a separate nation, with dozens of opposing forces running around like headless chickens. The regional commanders near Hong Kong quickly banded together and tried to invade Taiwan. The Chinese had existed as a sovereign people for over five thousand years, but lo and behold the most populous nation on earth now, little more than a rabble-rousing collection of city-states. The whole of Southeast Asia had shattered, and was now coming together in an unfamiliar jigsaw puzzle from hell; the cardboard is the land and the paints are the blood, sorrow, and destruction wrought from the people by the military commanders. Southeast Asia had a great fall, and all the worlds' horses and all the worlds' men could not put it back together again.

The situation in the Middle East was not much better, as anti-Western, Islamic terrorist groups had declared the actions of the dark lord to be the determination of Allah. The cities of the nations who supported the Alliance were under constant attack. Even the holy city of Mecca was not safe from the bloodshed as gunmen slaughtered Muslims on their yearly visit to the holy place. One of the factions, Hezbollah, even went so far as to execute any Islamic priests who did not espouse the cause, the virtues or the methods of the dark lord. The Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, Turkey had been converted into a makeshift hospital for the smallpox victims. 'Taking pity on the infidels and those against Allah' caused the makeshift infirmary to be destroyed by Al Qaeda. The human race was tearing itself apart at the seams and there was no way to stop it.


	5. A Storm in the East

A/N: Once again thank you for the reviews. I have recovered from a brief battle with depression, which spawned the cry for help. From now on updates will take a few weeks to post. In addition, if you read this story at least it is considerate enough to tell me your opinion. Hit the damn purple button and tell me how I am doing, or I will hunt you down and gut you like a fish if you do not. I can do it I have the resources and nothing but time to kill.

A storm in the east

Camp Al-Shazarif, one hundred twenty-five kilometers inside the Iranian border

0037 GMT (4:07 AM Tehran Standard Time), 1 December 2001

The eyes of one Mohammad Zaquari looked out over the darkened desert in this, the largest training ground for Al Qaeda and the jihad in opposition to the west. The tents were tranquil at present, but before long they would be bustling with activity, as the dark lord's proxy would be stopping through to dole out instructions for the jihad. As dawn approached, the watch fires extinguished and new recruits began their daily prayers to Allah, and veteran jihadi began weapons training. The man assigned as the proxy between the dark lord and this particular camp was a Belgian ex-Red Beret christened Henry Cazeux, and he had a noteworthy rancor against the Americans. The jihadi would have even considered him one of their own if not for the actuality that he was an infidel, a Roman Catholic. He was not only a cunning and sadistic warrior, but he was also one of the prevalent suppliers of methamphetamines to the world at large, in consequence, he raked in huge amounts of cash for the dark lord.

When Henry Cazeux arrived in, what he considered, a pitiful camp in the middle of a god-forsaken desert, he could not help but sneer in disgust at the desert rats his master was helping. He carried with him the stolen blueprints for the Iranian nuclear reactor near the Gulf of Aden. The dark lord wanted these jihadi to 'appropriate' radioactive waste grade material from the reactor complex, and then produce a dirty bomb that would spread radioactive waste over a huge area. Cazeux was exceedingly dubious that this… militia… could perform this mission up to the standards of his lord. Nevertheless, since the dark lord assigned him to this work personally, he would do this work to the best of his ability. He would rather report the camps position to the allies and have to work with these inferior beings.

As Zaquari looked over the plans, his mind filled with reservation and apprehension. Even though the Iranian government had issued no official statement regarding their position on the war, security forces all over the world beefed up just in case the dark lord attacked them. A few weeks ago, this mission would have been a cakewalk, but now it resembled more of a kamikaze mission than anything else did. Moreover, they could no longer bribe the guards to look the other way, not after the Hagia Sophia had destroyed, along with 800 souls inside. That was one of the few things that the fundamentalist government absolutely condemned, the destruction of a mosque and holy place. Even with the medium artillery the small band of jihadi would be able to get to the site in a couple of weeks, they would still face stiff resistance. Nevertheless, if Allah's will were for him and his men to die in this operation, then he would meet his death with open arms. After Cazeux left he began his daily training, but he also heaved a sigh of relief.

Yemeni freighter _King Xoser_, 20 kilometers north-northwest of Alexandria, Egypt.

0341 GMT (5:41 AM Local), 1 December 2001

Shipping in the Mediterranean had been chaotic since the dragon attacks, which proved that the enemy could strike both the land and sea. Ships had been frantically to get any port, in the hope that military air defenses would somewhat protect them. Even during the best of times, the port at Alexandria was a nightmarish place to navigate, with a relatively shallow bottom and protected archeological sites where no commercial traffic could pass overhead. However now, it looked like the freeway into Los Angeles at rush hour, in other words ships were end to end and there was a huge backup in the approaches to the port. The _Xoser_ was one of those unfortunate ships stuck far out side the harbor so far out in fact, that they were in international waters. In normal circumstances, the _Xoser_ would have been one of the first ships into the harbor, but these were anything but normal times.

The shipping manifest listed the _Xoser_ as carrying perishable food items that had to keep in cold storage. In truth the _Xoser_ was illegally carrying eighty tons of OXBN high explosive, which is six times more powerful than dynamite, a Class A felony punishable by a life sentence in the slammer. The captain of the Japanese constructed freighter was intensely nervous, as any sane person would be after sailing for three weeks with enough high explosives to destroy the Great Wall of China. Obviously, the timetable he'd been provided with had changed and nobody had notified him, which made him even more nervous. As he smoked his cigar, he stewed upon the fact that even though the boss told him that this was an essential part of the plan, the plans changed and now he now had no idea what to do with the cargo. He knew he was a sheep, and he was happy to be lead around with no idea that his often-illegal cargo used for unscrupulous activities, as long as the men who hired him paid handsomely.

However now as he was, cut off from his employer, an Englishman, he had no clue as to whether the boss was alive or not, so he went over the actions he could take now. The first option that came to mind was to report his cargo to the authorities and try to make a deal with them. This plan quickly flew out the window as he thought of the possible consequences, which painted for him a very un-rosy future in a prison. A second option was to try to act as if nothing was wrong and unload half the cargo at Alexandria as planned. Just as before, this course discarded when he remembered that now every container unloaded the customs officers inspected fully, with the crew and captain of the ship at gunpoint. Just as he decided to sail on to his second destination of Barcelona, Spain, a knife held by a masked figure slit his throat from behind. The _Xoser_ and its deadly cargo left the approaches to Alexandria and sailed off to the west.

_SSGN 726 Ohio_, Shelter Dock 4X, King's Bay, Georgia

0430 GMT, 1 December 2001, (11:30 PM, 30 November 2001, EST)

This would be the first test of the newly refitted _Ohio_'s capability to both patrol and make war. The defense department had refitted the Ohio from a ballistic missile platform into a guided missile launch platform. In place of the original twenty huge silos, behind the conning tower, there were now over five hundred smaller silos, which could hold any type of missile that Navy had in their stockpiles. This ship truly represented the next generation of the submersible naval combat vessel, one that is fast, well armed and armored and could engage targets on the land and in the air and sea. A week ago, the _Ohio_ had been preparing for a demonstration for defense contractors, which would get them to build better missiles. However now, it was to sail under full steam to the South China Sea to thwart the takeover of Taiwan by Chinese military commanders.

The skipper of this mighty vessel, Commander Bart Mancuso, was ready for some action. For the past three years, he had been training with a new crew in preparation for Operation COLD FLAME, a simulation of naval and air attacks on the eastern seaboard. However, that training which was to be a harmless exercise, now being put to test, in a true field of battle. As the last SM-3s, Harpoons and Tomahawks were loaded into their tubes; Mancuso gave the order 'rig ship for departure', which caused a flood of activity as seamen scrambled through the passageways to get to their posts. When the go-ahead came from the exterior weapons detail, the boat began silently to descend into the inky depths of the sea, and only when it was completely submerged did the majestic vessel motor out of the dock. These brave men knew that the coming battles might claim their lives, but they also knew that by fighting those very battles, they would secure the world's freedom.

Clark AFB, Luzon, the Philippines

0430 GMT (12:30 PM Manila Standard Time), 1 December 2001

Gloomy hazel eyes looked out over the flight line, moving slowly over the newly arrived B-2A Spirit bombers from Whiteman made ready for combat missions across the face of the globe. The man these eyes belonged to had been assigned to this squadron for the past fifteen years, for which he and his wife had been very appreciative. Those fifteen years had seen the gradual fading of the pain caused by the loss of his only child. When he first came to the United States with his wife, the pain was still fresh and it seemed that no amount of time could cause the sorrow to fade away. For just over twenty years, he and his wife had forsaken their old life, and hoped never to go back to the world that had put them through Hell. However, no man can forever escape his demons, no more than King Canute could stop the tides. The demons that had for so long been unable to find him and his wife suddenly reared their heads and this time there was no evading them.

He shook himself out of the horrible past and started to focus on the worse present. As he looked over the weather report for the Sea of Japan, he faintly grinned; it seemed that Japan once again saved from destruction by a divine wind. A category 4 typhoon that made any type of amphibious landing impossible suddenly showed up 140 miles east of Tokyo, and it moved swiftly toward the Sea of Japan. This happened to be a stroke of extreme luck as it gave half of the pilots about three days to rest, and three days was plenty of time for the heavy weapons to get to Clark. The rest of the pilots were not so lucky, they assigned to fly missions around Formosa, or Taiwan. Moreover, the weather in the South China Sea was perfect for amphibious operations and aerial sorties of all kinds. Right now, the only airborne defenses around Taiwan were Predator and GlobalHawk UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) with a pair of machine guns on each drone. Things were indeed bleak, but the hazel eyed major general was grateful for the storm in the east of Japan.


	6. The ashes from the Furnace

A/N: I would like to thank all the readers who have graciously offered their opinions on my work. If you want a minor character in this story to be yours (e.g. you name, physical description, personality, career/location, ect.) please tell me in a review the information you want in the story. Warning: any information left out will be filled in by my imagination, so please be thorough. Any flames are to roast the people who sent them. Trust me, until school starts again I have nothing but time. So tell me what you think, and I will give you my response.

The ashes from the Furnace

The outskirts of London, the United Kingdom  
0627 GMT, 1 December 2001

The first post-detonation excursions into the ruins of London occurred from within eight M93A1 Fox NBCRS (**N**uclear, **B**iological, and **C**hemical **R**econnaissance **S**ystem) vehicles on loan from the US Army. Even when the vehicles were more then fifteen miles from ground zero, Geiger counters were picking up over 130 rads of radiation, a lethal dose. Looking out at the destruction by means of periscopes, the eight scouting crews could see the total devastation of what were once suburbs filled with people. Now the only things left were burning shells of houses, businesses, and schools. Even in this radioactive desert, people had survived, and as they saw the nearest M93, they stormed it attempting to get in for a temporary respite from the awful heat. The outside temperature gauges showed the outside air to be 162 degrees Fahrenheit (72.22°C). The very air clogged in the nose and lungs with a poisonous ash, and all around there were the charred vestiges of bodies.

As the vehicles got closer to ground zero, the number of survivors dropped stridently. The six-wheeled armored vehicles made their way through the city streets, and as they did, they saw whole buildings still standing, but just as dead as the surroundings. As the passed, the spot where London General Hospital once stood the recon crews saw the remains of doctors, nurses and patients. The bricks that had once made the buildings around them had shattered from the high temperatures directly after detonation, almost 6000 °F (3315.5 °C), no doubt spraying the interiors with molten brick fragments. When they reached the spot where, according to the wizards they had their hospital, they discovered it not only standing but also practically unharmed. As they passed, they could see people in the windows waving frenetically, but moreover they saw the bodies of the minority who determined to hightail it out the major doorway. They would be sure to tell their commanding officers to send in modified LAV-A (Light Armored Vehicle, Ambulance) vehicles and evacuate the hospital.

When they reached the spot, where the Leaky Cauldron should have been, they saw a huge five-mile long, five-mile wide depression with a gigantic bump at the far end. According to the rough drawings they had been given, that bump was purportedly their bank. Two of the M93s went to check for any survivors, but all they found was blood, radioactive debris and burnt skeletons. The spot where the Ministry of Magic was expected to be at, looked like casehardened lava flows and it was perfectly evident that there would be no survivors. Buckingham Palace was not much better, and the Parliament building was simply vanished, wiped from the face of the earth. The area in the region of the Thames been hammered and was now unrecognizable. By now, the Geiger counters were recording almost 950 rads, well over ninety times the lethal dose, and the outside air temperature was almost 400°F (ca. 204.44°C). The substance the armored vehicles were moving on was no longer asphalt, but a six-inch think layer of nuclear made glass. The city of London beyond all doubt had been shattered both in body and in spirit.

Near Taipei, Taiwan, the island of Formosa  
0715 GMT (3:15 PM), 1 December 2001

As the first Chinese amphibious assault, vehicles were making their landings on the far side of the island, an AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) picked up J-11 Flanker fighter-bombers coming in from the mainland. The hazel-eyed Brigadier General ordered his flight to activate their ECM consoles and to go nose-hot. The ten B-2 bombers started searching for their first targets, and while this was happening, Taiwanese F-16 fighters flew up from Xi Kolhung AB to defend the American bomber force. As the assault force drew ever closer to the mainland, the B-2s let loose the first salvo of AGM-54 Mavericks. While the TV guided missiles flew on swift wings to their targets, some of the J-11 fighters on CAP snuck past the F-16 defensive screen and got within firing range of the B-2s. Since the radar returns on the bombers were so weak, the fighters made a quick strafing run at them. Three of the bombers were hit but the Chinese pilots did not get a chance for a second run, for just then SM-3 missiles from the _USS Cowpens_, a Ticonderoga class cruiser, slammed into the fuselages of the five fighters.

On the ground, the situation was not improving much for when the strafing run hit the bomber force most of the Mavericks were accidentally guided off-course and only one of them hit the assault ships. As the Chinese invaders landed, they met with stiff resistance, with 155mm artillery blasting away at the beaches. When the T-72 tanks got on the beach things became much more difficult, as the Taiwanese had no heavy armor of their own with which to defend themselves. Then coming from Xi Chiang AB on Taiwan came an AC-130 Spectre, an aircraft that had not seen combat since Vietnam. It circled around the beachfront, blasting away at the Chinese armor with its 120mm cannon. Unfortunately, a Stinger missile from one of the Chinese transports brought it down right on top of one of the bottleneck bunkers, thus opening a way off the beach to the Chinese forces. The T-72s rumbled down the highway towards the port city of Tsoying, and it looked like only a miracle could stop them.

As the B-2 formation circled over the island, they began warming up the CHIMERA drones for the combat debut. The hazel-eyed general released his drone and took direct control of it, steering it hastily towards the main highway. As the CHIMERA flew over the armored column, the first set of bomb bay doors opened and out fell dozens of Anti-Tank mines. The effect was almost instantaneous, as the first three tanks in the column went up in flames as the hot shrapnel pierced the thinly armored underbelly of the battle tanks and ignited the ammunition. The highway had been effectively blocked from all travel by motor vehicle, but the infantry still moved quickly down the freeway. However, the CHIMERA was not finished yet, as it turned around and lined up for the second run. The second set of bomb bay doors opened and out came napalm canisters that exploded mid-flight, and rained hellfire on the advancing infantry. Finally, to stop the advance along the highway the drone activated its suicide protocol and blew a 30-foot long section of the road into instant gravel.

By this time, the Chinese attack force had secured the beaches and as the B-2 formation flew overhead, lucky shots from hastily established AA sites fatally wounded two of the bombers. Before bailing out, the crews of the two bombers programmed the computers to fly the mortally wounded bombers into Allied held ocean so as not give any intelligence away to the Chinese. As the crews bailed out, they got a birds-eye-view of the battlefield, and a perfect view of where they were going to land, directly among the burning Chinese main battle tanks. When they landed infantry quickly captured them, and they were told that soon they would beg to have their captors shoot them. As they were taken away one of the pilots activated an emergency GPS transponder that had been sewn into the fabric of his flight suit. The most he could hope for at this point was that he would be rescued before he died in the POW camp, which was surely his destination.

Mission Control, Houston Space Command Center, Houston, Texas, the United States  
0947 GMT (3:47 AM CST), 1 December 2001

The mission to bring the new space station_Michael_ _Collins_ on-line had been delayed several times, as the administration was very uneasy about breaking two international treaties, one that forbid space-borne weapons, and the ABM treaty of 1972. However, now the need for an effective anti-ballistic missile system that could defend an entire third of the earth had become clear with the recent nuclear attacks. The weapons and targeting modules for the _Collins_ would have gone up in early to mid 2002 after extensive testing but that option was no longer viable. The _Collins_, when it was finally completed, would be a work of art; it would be able to defend hundreds of millions of cubic miles of airspace against ballistic missiles and even aircraft. Now pressed into service for the US Air Force and Space Command, it would orbit above the Asian continent and help defend America's in the war to follow. As the state-of-the-art targeting module was connected, the faces of the mission controllers showed a severe determination about how the focus of their missions had changed from civilian to military in application.

When the final bolts on the weapons module locked in, the small nuclear reactor onboard the station remotely activated and powered up all the systems for a final systems check. When the results came in they showed all systems were ready for action of any type. The long-term crew got back in the station and began the procedures to break the hard-lock with the shuttle. When the shuttle was safely away, they began inputting instructions for the maneuvering rockets to begin a series of polar orbits that would put them over the South China Sea in four days. As the computers began firing the ion thrust rockets; the ten-person crew deployed the huge radar system employed by the targeting module so that they could scan the globe as they glided over it. Almost instantly, they picked up dozens of military cargo aircraft above both American continents. Moreover, they knew that they were in this war for the long haul, and in the end whether for good or evil, they would do their duty.


	7. Striking Hot Iron

A/N: I would once again like to thank all those that have reviewed. My offer from last chapter is still up. As a thoughtful reviewer pointed out to me, I have this story listed in the Gabrielle Delacour character list on So as a response to all those who are wondering when I plan to introduce her, it will be in the next few chapters. ON another note, this story is already on a much larger scope than I had originally planned, and as such, I will not finish this story by the start of school so as of August 15, 2006, updates will be much slower in coming, so please be patient. In addition, just in case anybody is wondering, I am using actual military tactics, strategy, technologies, and vehicles, unless specified, for added realism.

Striking hot iron

Salem, Oregon, the United States

1245 GMT (4:45 AM PST), 1 December 2001

It was silent in the early pre-dawn hours around the forge of Jeff Strauser, save for the ringing of his hammer against the hot metal he was shaping. He was a blacksmith by trade, and this showed in his everyday life as all around his workshop there were daggers and swords of every type imaginable. He was now shaping the breastplate for a suit of armor, and he still had a ton of orders to fulfill. The attacks may have spelled disaster for some people but for him it was a windfall of gargantuan proportions. Now, everybody and his brother were looking for any type of protection possible, and since sales of fully automatic weapons were still officially prohibited, they went to their local smithy for their protection needs. As he finished shaping the breastplate and set it off to the side to cool, he decided to take a break and begin on one of the blades for his personal collection, a design of his own based off a 16th century samurai sword. He retrieved a three-foot long rod of iron and put it in the immensely hot forge, and after it started glowing from the heat, he took it out and began shaping it on his anvil.

Just as he finished the first courses of metal shaping, he felt a tremendous ripple in wards he had erected around his workshop. He put a stasis charm on the red-hot metal, and went to investigate what could have made his wards react so violently. Still he was no fool, so he picked up two of his throwing daggers and a long sword which he sheathed on his back; he had met quite a few of his magical brethren who were unhappy that he choose to use his talents in a trade which the mundane people of the world used as well. As he walked out of his workshop and looked about, he saw nothing and that was precisely what made him exceptionally on-edge. As he turned back towards the door of his workshop, he had to duck quickly as a malevolent blood boiling curse hit right were his head had been only seconds before. He rolled for the cover of the nearby bushes, and from their safety, he looked around for the enemy.

One of his attackers passed right by the bush he was hiding in, so he tripped them with a sweeping kick, and then quickly slit their throat with one of his daggers. He leapt out of the bushes and came face to face with a six-foot tall figure in weighty black robes wearing a half-skull mask. He speedily took this person down with a rapid combination of punches and kicks he had learned from Tae Kwon Do. When the figure fell, he saw another behind it and he quickly threw one of his daggers, and the third Death Eater went down. He heard a sound coming from in close proximity to the door to his workshop and blindly threw the second dagger towards the sound. When he saw what he had hit, he was greatly disappointed as his dagger, now severely embedded in the door. As he looked at the dagger, the last Death Eater grabbed him in a stranglehold. He quickly broke the grip of the Death Eater, and disabled him by delivering a swift hammer-strike to the side of his neck, hitting the vagus nerve directly. As he looked around, he felt thankful to be breathing after that devilish skirmish, and he went inside to phone the police.

Lockheed Martin Skunkworks, somewhere in the Midwestern United States

1322 GMT (7:22 AM EST), 1 December 2001

The first operational flight of the new SR-95 Aurora spy plane was only minutes away, and the techs and flight crew were exhilarated. The plane was a masterwork, a divine aircraft that could fly at speeds in excess of Mach 7 and altitudes over 25 miles high. The new laser radar, or LADAR, system would identify and analyze anything larger than a meter and send targeting information to battlefield units through the Warfighter Information Network, or WIN for short. The ground penetrating radar, or GPR, on the Aurora would detonate all non-US model mines on a battlefield and be able to identify tunnels and other subterranean structures such as bunkers. Finally, the order came, the skies were clear, and the Aurora quickly moved to the end of runway 5 Left. When the crew was clear of the jet wash, the Auroras robust powerful engines roared into life and began rolling swiftly down the runway.

The plane leapt into the air and quickly climbed to thirty thousand feet where it hooked up with a KC-10 Extender so it could refuel. As soon as the tanker's boom was clear, the crew of the Aurora locked themselves into their seats and donned their bubble-like helmets, in preparation for the high altitude. They knew if the plane somehow caught any anti aircraft fire while at their operating altitude, ejection was not an option; if they got hit, they were dead, simple as that. As they climbed higher and higher into the stratosphere, they saw the blue sky deepen into a crushing black and in due course, they saw stars as moved into the ionosphere. Finally, as they reached Mach 4, the new scramjet engines kicked in and they pushed back into their seats as the aircraft accelerated. They crossed the Atlantic in only an hour and a half, and then they headed straight for the Danish-German border where the services of the new covert reconnaissance aircraft were badly needed.

25 miles northwest of Kiel, Germany

1607 GMT (5:07 PM Local), 1 December 2001

In the slowly dimming light of the late afternoon, the evidence of battle was seen in the burning carcasses of German Lepard-2 tanks and Danish-owned AMX 30 tanks. All around the field of combat, great plumes of smoke, fire, and dirt would erupt with no more warning than a piercing whistling before each sixteen-inch shell made impact. The shells were fired from the USS Iowa, BB 61, and were hitting as many friendly units as they were enemy units, so the artillery was as much a help as a hindrance. The German general, Generaloberst Günter Rommel, grandson of Erwin Rommel, had been fighting the Danish forces for the past two hours, and even though the Danish army threw five divisions into the assault on northern Germany against Germany's three divisions, the offensive had been stopped cold. However, just then, the tide of battle shifted in favor of the Danes as almost fifty figures in the signature Death Eater cloaks apparated into the field of battle and started casting curses left and right. The German tank crews thought that they were safe inside their heavily armed and armored vehicles, but they quickly learned otherwise.

The lead Death Eater, a somewhat short figure with a silver mask that denoted a position in the innermost circle of power, shot off a red colored beam of light that struck the front of a Lepard and completely crumpled it. After the secondary explosions finished all that remained was a 55-ton heap of twisted metal, and then the true battle commenced. The Lepard crews frenetically attempted to contact their superiors over the battalion, division and corps radio networks but all the frequencies were jammed. Now they were in a losing battle with bent comms and no way to call in additional forces or artillery fire. As tank after tank exploded after hits from the destructive curses, it looked like the Danes would be able to break through Zeile Guderian, the German northern defensive line. As the hole in the German defensive line widened, Danish AMX 30s poured through the gap.

The crew of one Lepard reacted quickly and swiftly traversed their 120mm smoothbore main gun towards a large group of the black cloaked figures, and fired an HE round at the group. Most of them were caught in the blast, but the leader, the one with the silver mask, was knocked out. Soon after the crew turned tail and moved hastily back towards the concealed secondary defensive positions where reserve troops where waiting. The 142nd Infantry battalion occupied position Zweite, and was waiting for the enemy with Panzerfaust 3-T 600s, German-manufactured laser guided antitank missiles. As the Lepards rolled past the hidden defenders, the Danish forces recklessly pursued the fleeing German armor. When the Danish armor came within 700 meters of position Zweite, the 142nd locked onto them. As soon as the readouts on the Pzf 3s showed the careless Danish armor to be less then six hundred meters away, they opened fire and in a little more than a second almost two-thirds of the Danish armor went up in flames, and the rest began to beat a hasty retreat.

By then the Aurora, was soaring high above the battlefield watching all of this with their LADAR system, but they also saw something that the ground forces could not especially with the comms blackout. They saw three battalions worth of armor and what looked like two full brigades of infantry moving straight toward Kiel. Spearheading the force were two battalions worth of AMX 13/90s, Danish-owned light tanks bought from French stockpiles many years before. The main armored force was hugging the coast, while the infantry was moving towards the battle-weary troops of the 142nd infantry battalion, and what remained of the 3rd Panzer Guards. As the infantry reached the battlefield, they met with furious fire from both the remaining tanks and the 142nd. Just then, the Auroras crew activated the ground penetrating radar as they soared above the Danish infantry. They caused massive casualties as thousands of mines detonated no matter if they were in the ground or in a soldiers pack. Unfortunately switching on the GPR also caused casualties on the friendly side of the battlefield as well.

After the Aurora was clear, the effects of the GPR could be seen; most of the German left flank on the battlefield had collapsed but by that time, more reinforcements started arriving from the reserve positions. German IFV Marder 1A3s and APCs BTR-60s rushed forward to strengthen the defensive line and to take on those of the enemy that been captured. The now much less formidable Dutch infantry were only a hundred meters away when the first of the armored personnel carriers and IFVs (Infantry Fighting Vehicles) roared over the ridge that the Germans were defending. As the Marder crews caught sight of the enemy, they opened up on them with the 20mm auto-cannons mounted on the tops of their vehicles. From only 160 meters, the effect was devastating; the shoddy Danish advance, just a large group of targets, was decimated, quickly and efficiently. As reinforcements strengthened the German line the Danish forces retreated quickly, leaving their wounded behind. The German forces pursed them mainly for show, and regained all the ground they lost earlier in the day.

When the APCs with the Geneva signs on their sides appeared, the German infantry began searching the battlefield for anybody that was not dead. As they searched through the burned out hulks of tanks, two of them found one of the Death Eaters, the one with a silver mask, lying unconscious near the shell of a Lepard. They took the mask off the figure and they shined a flashlight on its face, they both got a happy grin. In the few days since the war started, they had taken to studying the magical enemy and memorizing faces of the key players; and they had just captured one of the most dangerous without a fight. They were sure that they would get the Iron Cross, First Class, for their actions, for these two men had just captured Ginny Weasley. From here, her path would lead to a super-maximum security medical facility near Munich, and then to West Siberia. At least for now, she could do no one any more harm.


	8. Yea, though I walk through the valley

A/N: I would again like to thank all those who have offered their comments and constructive criticism. Character positions are still open for any who want a part in this story and if have any specific type of character in mind then tell me. I would like to revise my previous position on flames; I will now accept them so long as they are polite, are composed of more than 'This story sucks' or something along those lines, and are constructive in their critique. If you have any suggestions as to new ideas and/or directions for this story then please, share them.

Yea, though I walk through the valley

_The weeks after the first attacks were filled with intense fighting and horrors that will never fade from my mind. Tens of millions of lives had been wiped out in microseconds, and so much happened in so short a time. Old rivalries between nations erupted into grudge matches, and radical terrorist groups destroyed so much without rhyme or reason. I had been fighting for years, and it seemed that the weight of more than one world was on my shoulders. In the months ahead, I would see people I fought alongside with, who I knew, who I loved; fall to either a curse or a bullet. As I witnessed the horrors slowly unfurl I could only imagine the trials that the days ahead of me would bring. _

_--Excerpt from the personal journal of Harry James Potter, entry dated 12-17-2004--_

Near the ruins of Manchester, the United Kingdom

2341 GMT, 1 December 2001

The scattered remnants of the British Army were massing near what remained of Manchester before going on a countrywide security sweep that would put Britain back in British control. Troops were coming in all the time in RAF CH-47D Chinook transport choppers, and in Warrior IFVs, but they were avoiding the main roads in case there were enemies hiding along them, so the tanks and IFVs came in trickles. When they had finally gathered enough troops to make two divisions they split in two and both began moving out, one to the north and one to the south. A fiery lass from the north, Major General Louise O'Connelly, headed up the southern division. She had started out as a common ground soldier, but she quickly became known as the British answer to the American general George S. Patton. Although she was only a little over five feet tall, when angered, which could happen quickly, she could make even the strongest of men retreat very quickly. She led her armored division down through the midlands towards Birmingham, which according to intel reports was rife with the enemy.

They were about forty kilometers outside of Birmingham when the advance-armored columns drove straight into an ambush. Many flashes of colored light and explosions erupted from the middle of the armor formations and fire was quickly concentrated on the center of the column. The mechanized infantry company with them quickly dismounted but machine gun fire, which was coming from their own side, quickly cut them down. As the firing stopped, the troops heard numerous popping and cracking noises, and suddenly the gunfire started up again, only this time it was almost all from the enemy. Lights were flashing all around as the army units searched frantically from a target to fire at, but not one search lamp found one of the enemies, so most of the firing was blind. Most of the infantry were dead after nearly ten minutes of uninterrupted battle with the unseen enemy and then the Death Eaters moved to the armor, throwing fragmentation grenades in through the main hatch on the turret. By the time Major General O'Connelly got there with the general infantry, the entire armor battalion was dead along with most of the mechanized infantry and most of the vehicles had irreparable damage.

SAC-NORAD Command, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, the United States

0124 GMT, 2 December 2001 (6:24 PM MST, 1 December 2001)

While most of China had been torn apart at the seams, there were some provinces which banded together to form small countries. Three of these provinces were Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang which had fused together to make Dongbei, or translated into English, Manchuria. The three military commanders in charge of the provinces were brothers; Han Chang, Han Kai-chiang, and Han Lianshun were in charge of Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang respectively. The three bothers decided to put up a united defense against the North Korean aggressors, and they promptly moved their troops towards the Yalu River. By the time the heavy weapons mobilized, the Koreans had already penetrated up to the city of Tonghua. Here we join the mêlée for Tonghua, recognized later as a decisive turning point as it was the first major conflict since the First World War in which chemical weapons saw action.

4 kilometers south of Tonghua, the Chinese Republic of Dongbei

0133 GMT (9:33 AM Local), 2 December 2001

The North Koreans were spearheading the attack with several infantry corps, with troop concentrations numbering near 260,000 infantry, about one-tenth of total number of North Korean forces. The Chinese infantry fought valiantly against the North Korean invaders, but sheer force of numbers had forced the frontlines back to the city of Tonghua. However, at Tonghua the Koreans met with vicious artillery fire from a battalion of Type 83 SPG-H (Self-Propelled Gun-Howitzer) vehicles stationed about 11 kilometers to the north. This softened up the approaching forces but did almost nothing to break the resolve of their enemy. Two flights of Mi-24P (Hind F) attack helicopters armed to the teeth with S-8 rocket launchers and 23mm MG pods flew in from Fushun and began harassing the infantry as they were climbing over the rough mountainous terrain. Nevertheless, no matter what the defenders did to the advancing army, they kept on coming. Just when it seemed the city would be lost to the hordes of Koreans, two full battalions of Type 85-IIM tanks appeared on the road into Tonghua.

When the approaching armor came within 2500 meters of the enemy, they began rain raining a deadly kind of fire upon the units of the KPA (Korean People's Army). Still the enemy juggernaut advanced with what seemed an impossible force towards the city of 9 million. Suddenly and for no perceptible reason, the KPA mysteriously began to retreat, and the Chinese enthusiastically and unthinkingly pursued them. 150 kilometers to the south, a KPA missile battery was preparing to fire on the unwary Chinese forces. The Nodong-1 TELs (Transporter-Erector-Launchers) rose into position and, one by one dozens of Chinese-made SRBMs flew off into the stormy grey clouds. On the battlefield to the north, the Nodongs were not terribly accurate, but they did not need to be. As the missiles came out of the cloud cover, they dropped 66 bomblets apiece, each one containing three liters of VX nerve gas, which released when the canisters were 25 meters above the ground. After only three and a half minutes, the dead Chinese infantry lay strewn about the battlefield, and the armor, which had survived due to the NBC filtration systems, was evading arty rounds from KPA artillery. As the armor fell into disarray, the KPA tore through the few tanks that stood their ground and tried to delay the KPA advance. Korean light tanks surged forward into the heart of Tonghua, and shortly thereafter infantry followed. By 11 AM local time, the battle to stop the KPA at Tonghua was fought and lost.

A secret MI-5 facility near the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, the United Kingdom

0315 GMT, 2 December 2001

The remnants of the SAS (Special Air Service) and the British Secret Services, MI5 and MI6, as well as parts of the French counter-terrorist group GIGN, were meeting with the elite commando team that had carried out the raid on the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. They were meeting with the hope of creating a new super-elite team that would be able to deal with the Dark Lords operatives around the world on extremely short notice. The team would also augment regular troops in large-scale operations and as normal SpecOps during and after the war. Although almost 70 of the members of the four organizations had been wiped out, together they could make make-up a battalion sized force. Most of the meeting was just getting logistics out of the way, but they also began planning their first international joint mission, a retaliatory strike against Fujian, the self-proclaimed 'nation' that had invaded the island of Taiwan, but that would be a long time in coming. The men and women of the five organizations talked well into the morning.

Before any large-scale international missions could take place, the newly christened Force Sigma would supplement the British army in their undertaking of stabilization of Britain and the restoration of control to what remained of the crown. Their first joint mission would be the sanitization of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which according to the scattered radio transmissions being picked up had a rampant infection of enemy troops. The French would provide the _Georges Leygues_ class destroyers FS_ Montcalm_ and FS _Primauguet_ as naval support ships for the cleansing of the city. The Royal Navy would provide the _Invincible_ class aircraft carrier _HMS_ _Ark Royal_ as an air support operations base, and all four Type 42 III destroyers for naval fire support. The mission would not be easy, but the rewards far outweighed the risks. The assault would take place in three days, when the last of the naval support were due to arrive at the rally point. With any manner of luck, they would be able to cleanse the city of most major enemy forces in three days. The meeting adjourned at 9:43 AM, and the members of the five elite forces returned to their respective headquarters to prepare for the attack.

Prague, the Czech Republic

1000 GMT (11:00 AM Local), 2 December 2001

The city of Prague had seen many wars in its extensive and venerable history, but none that would match the devastation of the war to come. Officially, the Czech Republic declared itself a neutral party, one that would act as a protected haven for refugees and those looking to escape the horrors of the war. The Czechs were not looking to be cannon fodder for a nation such as Germany as they had been in World War II, nor as they had been for the Soviets all throughout the Cold War. They would patrol their borders and repel any foreign military intrusions, but they would not advocate either side in the war. Unfortunately as with all isolationist policies in times of war, they would inevitably be drawn into the conflict and forced to fight or face destruction. As they prepared their cities for the incoming wounded and those seeking asylum, they began placing a second Iron Curtain around part of Europe. Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and surprisingly Romania, had agreed with the sentiments articulated by the Czech people and joined it in a pledge of absolute neutrality. The countries involved knew that both sides in the war would brand them as traitors and cowards and in general denigrate them and their peoples, but all of them wanted to let the rest of the world solve their own problems.

However, there were many who wanted to fight; either with the Dark Lord for a chance to gain more power in the 'new world order', or with the Coalition to avenge those people incinerated in the nuclear fires. Neutral countries provided a safe haven not only for those seeking refuge, but also those who wished a secure base of operations safe from attack. One such man that had come to Prague would, in time, become most infamous for cruelty to POWs and others who he classed as 'undesirables'. This man was thought to be dead in the magical world, a victim of his own stupidity. He was posing as a doctor that had emigrated from the UK, thus explaining the heavily accented Czech he spoke. He would bide his time until the best possible moment when he would show his true colors, a demon with hair as red as the hell from whence he came. In time, this man would become known as Reinhardt Heydrich had been known before him, as the Butcher of Prague.


	9. The first strains of Twilight

A/N: I would once again like to thank all those who have taken the time to review my story, and to thank all who deem this story good enough to read and put on their favorites, alerts, C2s etc.

The first strains of Twilight

Clark AFB, Luzon, the Philippines

1035 GMT (6:35 PM Local), 2 December 2001

The first C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft from the 60th Air Mobility Wing based out of Travis AFB, California had just arrived with a consignment of heavy weapons, which slated for use in the defense of both Taiwan and Japan. Along with the cargo aircraft came the B-1R 37th Bomb Squadron out of Ellsworth AFB and 15 KC-10 Extender tanker aircraft out of Travis AFB, which would perform refueling operations for all aircraft assigned to operate in the South China Sea sector. Along with the heavy weapons came the Green Berets, F Company from Ft. Bragg, their mission would be to parachute into Taipei and hold back the Chinese forces until greater manpower could be mobilized. At that moment, only 12 of United States military forces were at battle-ready status, and the logistical situation was an absolute nightmare. As the General looked out over the flight line, his hazel eyes distant as he though about what he would face in the war to come. He held no illusions that he could stay in anonymity forever; he only hoped that when he was revealed to the world, that he and his wife would be ready to take the storm.

GIGN Headquarters, Paris, France

1055 GMT (11:55 AM Local), 2 December 2001

Gabrielle Delacour had been working for the international sector of the French counter-terrorist unit for several years, before the attacks on the UK and USA, and these only strengthened her resolve to see the end of the would-be tyrant Lord Voldemort. Having worked in the international sector for several years, she had lost most of her accent, but when angry she lapsed into the French language especially when cursing someone. As one of her foreign contacts had so eloquently put it: The French language is excellent to curse with, it is like wiping your ass with silk; and she quite agreed with the sentiment, if not the actual wording. She had joined the GIGN in '98, when she had turned sixteen, and due to her special skills in stealth and endurance (thanks to her veela heritage); she quickly advanced through the ranks. She had been on missions throughout the world: in Afghanistan, Argentina, Egypt, China, Russia, and even Iceland, where she met a very charming MI-6 agent while preventing a war between the divided Koreas. However, she had always returned home to her native France, where she most felt at home, excepting, of course, being with her fiancé in England.

She had first met her fiancé, Harry Potter, during the Triwizard Tournament where he had rescued her from the bottom of a lake even though he did not have to. From that, point on she was entranced by the handsome young man, and he conquered her fantasies from that day forward. She had dated other men and even gone to bed with some, but she knew in her very soul that her veela heritage had already selected her one true love, and she could not be happier. Just thinking about him now made her feel a certain kind of dampness in her knickers. She and Harry had met again at the wedding of her sister Fleur to one of the Weasley brood, specifically William. It turns out that she had dominated Harry's sexual fantasies as well, even though he was 'officially' dating Ginny, another of the Weasley brood, his thoughts always returned to her, imagining what his life would be with her, and often in NC-17 rated fantasies. Only eight months after he first started dating her, he proposed and when she accepted the ring, he had bought for her; the smiles on both their faces could be seen from the most distant stars. The air around them was almost humming with the strength of the love that these tow people had for each other.

Now as she walked towards the operations section to pick up her next assignment, she could not help but wonder what had become of her love. She knew he was not dead, because she would have felt her heart ripping in two, had he died. However, she decided to leave the worry for another day, for she needed to have her head on straight for any type of mission she could be assigned. When she got her assignment, she was secretly thrilled because she was going in with the first wave of parachutists in the liberation of Newcastle in only a few days. She knew that her love was still alive and after the battle, she would find him and lock them in the first available room for the next week and hopefully even longer than that. However, until that time she would need to focus all of her mental facilities on her job, and wheedling out from her superiors the information as to where she would most likely find her Harry.

Osan AB, South Korea

1124 GMT (8:24 PM Local), 2 December 2001

Although the amphibious operations planned by both sides postponed, due to Typhoon Kazami, land based operations over the Korean peninsula would still be viable for at least two more days. After that wind speeds would be in excess of 100 km/h, far too fast to fly with any degree of safety, and certainly too fast to fight with any amount of accuracy. However, for now at any rate, the contingent of American-made F-16H Block 60s and F-15C/Ds was keeping the battle for aerial supremacy in stasis, and it would soon become a war of grinding down the enemy and not stopping once they were down. In addition to the regular stationed fighter squadrons, there were the 12 state-of-the-art EB-1R Lancers of the 502nd Squadron that had flown in from DreamWorks via Eielson AFB in Alaska. They could be triple hatted as bombers, fighters, and as Electronics/Reconnaissance (ER) aircraft; and they could carry many weapons for multiple mission roles. Unfortunately, most of the high tech weaponry had to be left back at DreamWorks due to the atmospheric conditions caused by the typhoon, so the only weapons were unguided munitions. The cargo aircraft just could not fly through the vicious crosswinds, and going over the continent was right out due to the uncertain political situations in the shattered former provinces of China.

They prepared for the last of the days operations, a saturation bombing of KPA formations. The ATO (Air Tasking Order) had them flying against forces that were on the approaches to Kimpo, only a short distance from Seoul, the capital city, and the nerve center for the South Korean military forces. They knew that the success of their aerial bombardment missions would be crucial to the South Korean defense, for even though the two Koreas had had a cease-fire for almost fifty years, the South had partially relaxed its military and 65 of the regular forces could be called within a week. As such, the only units those were at full strength when the North invaded were Border Guards and they were equivalent to light infantry companies individually, with minor anti-armor capability. The crushing numbers of Northern troops and tanks quickly overwhelmed them, and the few that escaped manage to warn the nearest local garrisons of the impending battles. The KPA at first had seemed to be utterly self-assured that the people of the South would welcome them and glad turn on their capitalist oppressors. However, with every house and town they passed, the KPA gradually got the picture that they were not welcome in the least. Instead of joining the 'liberators' in bringing down the democratic government as the regular foot soldiers had expected, they found themselves at the center of massive riots that quickly turned violent. Once the crowd of enraged civilians took a soldier of the KPA, they would not be found again, at least not alive anyway.

At about 8:30 PM local time, the last of the pre-flight checklists had been completed, and the first of the twelve bombers made its way to runway CL4. As the aircraft obtained takeoff clearance from the tower, the four Pratt & Whitney engines went to full military power, and the mighty plane leapt forward. On two other runways, the same thing was happening, but the sight was no less awe-inspiring. After only about half an hour of flight, the computers indicated that the optimal bomb release pint was coming up in about ten minutes. From that point on it should have been like shooting fish in a barrel, but as the old adage says, a battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy. The first thing that went wrong was flawed intelligence; the skies were supposed to be clear of enemy air traffic, and unfortunately, they were not. The North Koreans had a defensive screen of MiG-29 Fulcrums flying a protective screen for them, and the Mikoyen Gruyevich fighter had been born and bred to hunt down and destroy enemy attackers. The Lancers had not been fitted with LPI (Low Probability of Intercept) radar yet so they were almost flying blind, in respect to other aircraft. Therefore, when the MiGs swept them with their fire control radar, the bomber crew could only tell that they had been painted as a target, but they could not tell if it was from civilian stations or military radars. The bombers were relying almost solely on the civil air defense radar for their defensive operations, so they got the warnings about the MiGs only when the first AA-10 Alamo missiles flew off the rails.

The first missile struck EAV-041, the "Straight Flush", near the right wing connection to the main fuselage, nearly shearing the entire right wing off the side of the aircraft. The command crew sent out a general mayday to the other aircraft and activated the homing beacon, in the hope that SpecOps demolition forces would be able to destroy the remains of the downed bomber before enemy forces could recover it, and reverse engineer it into something that could massacre coalition service members. Seconds after the first missile hit, the other bombers had gone to BUSTER and scattered in all directions, some going high, some going low, but all of them were hauling ass to get away from the MiGs. Another missile missed the left wing of EAV-046, the "Lucky Strike", by a hair's breadth but the proximity fuse detonated and shrapnel damaged engines 1 and 2. The bomber could notwithstanding fly but it could not do any high-G maneuvers so it had to try to make a direct abort back to Osan. Three of the bombers regrouped and pressed on towards their targets. The computers calculated the precise moment when to drop the lethal payloads of 500- and 2000-pound bombs, and when it arrived, the three bombers opened their bomb bay doors and let the entire load just drop.

Unfortunately, when the bomb doors are open the radar cross-section increased by a hundredfold, thus taking away the last of the bombers covertness. The DSO (Defensive Systems Operator) on each of the three aircraft immediately found the radar watchbands lit up like a Christmas tree, with military, civil defense, and civilian sets all looking at them. The North Korean SAM crews had been alerted to the hostile aircraft by the air defense command, and were just waiting for a target to present itself, and now three big juicy bombers had almost handed themselves over on a silver platter. The SA-15 Gauntlet crews began tracking the bombers with their powerful Kilo band Doppler radars, and after only a few seconds, they had an excellent lock on all three of them. The three SAM batteries ripple fired two missiles each, and the death carrying aluminum tubes sped off into the night, with smoke and fire trailing behind them. Two of the missiles scored good hits on the fuselage of the left outside bomber, and the entire airframe erupted in a chain of explosions caused by the jet fuel. The right outside aircraft escaped instantaneous obliteration but shrapnel from the two nearby missiles, which had proximity fuses, damaged the cockpit, killing the pilot and wounding the co-pilot. The last bomber completely escaped the inferno and quickly went to full afterburner and flew over the Yellow Sea, where it circled around towards Osan. The mission had been a complete wash, with three 1.6 billion dollar aircraft shot down and four grounded due to battle damage. For now, the 502nd Lancer squadron's war was over, but they would be back with a vengeance and a grudge to repay.


	10. Aut Vincere Aut Mori

A/N: Once again I would like to thank all those who have put this story on their favorites, alerts, whatever. Character positions are still open. Review to let me know how you like it.

Aut vincere aut mori

Almaty, Kazakhstan

1444 GMT (8:44 PM Local), 2 December 2001

The people of the Republic of Kazakhstan had not seen many of the effects of the war, or the terrors that would soon be upon them in their full terrible forms. The first snow of the year was falling on the city of Almaty and no one in the city knew the danger the pure white snow held. The storm front that was over the city held billions upon billions of dust particles that had been kicked up from the nuclear strikes against the dragon nesting sites all across Eastern Europe. Not only that, the clouds also held the radioactive byproducts and unused fissile material from the 475kt warheads of the Peacekeeper missile, which included I-131, Pu-239, Cs-137, unused U-235, tritium and Ba-141, all of which are highly radioactive and deadly to organic life. As the snow fell, children came out to play in the white wonderland, and young couples went for walks through the city on romantic evenings. Over the next week, the entire region near Almaty would see a dramatic rise in radiation poisoning, and more than 450 thousand would die within the first month. In time, Almaty and the area surrounding it would gain the moniker of 'The devil's winter home' and would receive almost 350 rads of radiation from the nuclear detonations over Europe.

DFXQ FPZQ JMWQ QOBW KKTA KGVO

RAF Lakenheath, near Suffolk, the United Kingdom

1527 GMT (3:27PM Local), 2 December 2001

Military aircraft from the continent had been landing almost non-stop at the SAC airbase unloading troops and equipment to help the British Fifth Army secure the East, Southeast, and the East Midlands of England. The British third Army, under Major General O' Connelly, would secure the West Midlands and the Southwest, and after those areas were secure, they would join up with the British Second Army and form the South English Home Guard. The British First Army would secure the Northwest, the Northeast, and the York's & the Humber, and then form the North English Home Guard. However, the securing of the British Isles would take the length of the entire war and then quite a bit longer after that. The Kingdom of England would not be under the rightful rule of the Queen for several years to come, and even then, the rest the Commonwealth would be in political turmoil. Spanish, Italian, and Greek troops were supplementing the badly depleted forces of the British Army, and within the next week, troops and technical support from Switzerland would be arriving. This would be the first war that the Swiss people had participated in since the 1815 Congress of Vienna, in which Switzerland had declared itself permanently neutral. However, the threat to the freedom of the entire world posed by the Dark Lord was so great, that the National Council voted unanimously for the declaration of war to eradicate this threat to humanity.

The US 93rd Fighter Squadron, aka the Makos, was flying close to non-stop because they had been charged with defending the whole of the East and Southeast of England from threat fighters. The pilots thought this to be one of the dumbest assignments in the entire war, because so far the enemy, meaning the wizarding forces of the Dark Lord had not fielded any aircraft, and most likely don't even understand what they are. Just as some of the F-16C fighters flying over the Thames were about to turn for home, their onboard radar sets picked up some RAF Harrier jets heading straight for them. They might have completely dismissed this as the RAF helping them out, but one of the pilots noticed that one of the IFF transponder codes was set to 7700, which declared an air emergency, and yet the aircraft was flying normally. The pilots spiked the aircraft transponders of the bogey squadron to confirm their identity, as the 8492nd Air defense squadron, but not one of the pilots answered, not even to acknowledge themselves as friendlies. After three minutes of trying to contact the Harriers, the American pilots finally called RAF Middenhall to identify the fighters, because they were based at Middenhall. However, repeated calls to all ground stations met with absolutely nothing coming back at them, even form the other planes in their flight, and with each unsuccessful radio transmission, the pilots became more frantic.

The American pilots switched over to weapons free mode, moved into attack formation, and then split up into two groups to perform a high-low attack maneuver. Both of the pairs of F-16C fighters locked onto one of the four Harriers, and moved into range for the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. The pilots tried one final time to contact the fighters, telling them that if they did not answer, then they faced their own destruction. Just as before, the only response they got was static and silence from both the ground and the newly reclassified bandits. Each of the fighters moved swiftly towards the Harriers, the pilots called out FOX 2, and each aircraft launched a single Sidewinder at the Harriers. Each of the IR-guided missiles struck their targets true and fast, and in less then a single minute the entire flight of Harriers was falling quickly to the bottom of the English Channel. When the fighters touched down at Lakenheath at 1613 GMT, instead of a heroes welcome they met with MPs, and furious RAF flyers, who were incensed at the actions of their American 'allies'. They later learned that the Harrier squadron slated to be their replacements was the one they shot down, and that all the ground radars showed the Harriers with normal IFF codes. This incident would hamper UK-US relations for months, and cause massive amounts of distrust between the two countries armed forces for years into the future.

Near Dunkirk, the Nord-Pas de Calais coast, France

1632 GMT, 2 December 2001

A rogue faction of the Dutch military, along with many senior government officials, had ousted Queen Beatrix, the true ruler of the Netherlands, in the early hours of November 29. She had only just managed to make it out of the capital of Amsterdam, with her personal contingent of bodyguards that had been handpicked out of the best of the Red Berets, when the news of the nuclear strikes reached them. Moreover, they were about to cross the border into Belgium when the new provisional government declared war on most of its neighbors, and they outright annexed the Principality of Luxembourg and the entire nation of Belgium. From then on out the Dutch people were as persona non grata to most of the world, and the job of convincing the world that they were a government-in-exile became that much harder. They were trying to get to the temporary British capital of Southampton and declare their intentions to Beatrix's third cousin, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and hope to God that she believed them. After Britain was under control of the Crown, she would plead for help in removing the hyper-aggressive traitors from power and restore Beatrix to her rightful place. She could only hope that the French civilians did not catch her and her bodyguards before she could declare to the world that she is just as much a victim as all the others hurt in the war. Her bodyguards may be elite, but they could not hold off a mob of determined civilians for very long, before they would have to resort to deadly force, and that could only end badly for her and her people.

As she and her bodyguards approached the port facilities at Dunkirk, the task of staying hidden became that much harder. With every person they passed on the street, she felt another weight drop upon her shoulders, thinking that someone would have seen her picture and would recognize her. The provisional government of the Netherlands had capitalized on the confusion of the world, and had been proclaiming all the actions they had taken to be the express orders of their 'illustrious leader' Queen Beatrix, and had been running her picture near non-stop on the national television stations and the internet. The French government had already made Queen Beatrix #1 on the Most Wanted list, so she had to take extreme pains not to be caught, or she would face a long drop and a sudden stop. She and her entourage made it to the ferry dock well enough, but they soon found that the ferry was not a viable option. The prospect of staying in France was definitely not an attractive one, as every minute spent in the French port meant the chances of discovery increased. Not only that, the Dutch Army was barreling towards France and would be close to Dunkirk by the next morning if the Belgians couldn't delay them. Moreover, from the ease with which the fugitive queen and her guards had crossed the border, it was likely that soon the Dutch army would soon be breathing down their necks. The Queen came to a decision and ordered her guards to escort her to the French Presidential Palace in Paris, where they would put their case before Jacques Chirac, the President asking him to recognize her as a leader-in-exile. If that failed then she was truly out of options for both her and her people.

First US Marines division Staging area, outside of Los Angeles, California

1719 GMT (9:17 AM), 2 December 2001

The First Marine division was assembling in southern California in preparation for shipping overseas to a FOB (Forward Operating Base) in the Philippines. Once there the Marines would await tasking orders that would send them to areas all around Southeast Asia; and if necessary, they would defend the islands of the Philippines them selves against invasion by enemy forces. The United States considered the Philippines a crucial Coalition ally, and the nation received a defense priority status, which meant that whatever it took to keep the Philippines on the Coalitions side would be done. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff were mainly concerned with what would happen to reaction power if Clark AFB were destroyed or captured. However, the commanders of the First Marines were mainly concerned that they might be heading into another Vietnam, a situation that could turn sour very quickly. The men and women of the First Marines thought they would help rid the world of a racist and fascist movement that threatened the security of not only their country, but of their very freedoms that they held so close to their hearts. They were also fighting to avenge the deaths of over 35 million people incinerated by the New York detonation, and they wanted to pay back every ounce of suffering that the enemy had caused the American people. They did not care if they were fighting the Dark Lord's wizarding forces or the nations that had cowardly allied with him; they just knew that they were going to be a powerful force of righteous anger and awe-inspiring weaponry that would help exterminate this cancer of humanity.

The first Marine division was only at 15 battle ready status, and for the first few months of operations they would supplemented with National Guard troops, who would in turn, be replaced by fresh units of Marines once recruiting numbers climbed higher which they were sure to do. Logistical problems of every sort popped up all over the place: Mortuary Affairs and band units in the frontlines; about a quarter of the units present did not have enough weapons to fight even a small skirmish, and all sorts of other problems cropped up. The military analysts would call this period between the attacks and the Coalition's first major response, 'the Dark Age' as almost nothing of true military value would be achieved. The leaders of the United States Marine Corps would see this time as one of the most embarrassing in the whole history of the Corps, because they, the most responsive military force on the planet, were caught with their pants around their ankles. The Marine High Command however was determined to make up for their failure to react quickly by making damn sure that they were not flat-footed again. From then on, the Corps would consider this fight to be one of either victory or death, and they would see it through to the very end.


	11. By the Grace of the Almighty

A/N: I would like to thank all my readers, and wish you a Happy New Year. Please be sure to read the author's note at the bottom.

Washington DC, the United States

1800 GMT (1:00 PM), 2 December 2001

The first of hundreds of funeral services carried out in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and almost the entire city of Washington, D.C. had turned out to honor the dead. In attendance were the President, the Vice-President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and almost the entire Congress of the United States. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, delivered the first speech of the day, and he spoke with all the solemnity of his station as Chief Justice. He spoke of the need to stay the course and he asked the people to never let the enemies of freedom and peace who had committed the terrible attacks on the United States and the United Kingdom to have a moments rest. Priests, imams, and rabbis form all sorts of religions laid thousands of people who had died in the nuclear blast over New York to rest, and prayed for their souls. The cathedral, stuffed to the gills, saw one of the most harrowing times in the history of the United States and it would many more. The grave procession, broadcast live on all national television circuits, was interrupted right in the middle of the mass eulogy as it was delivered by the Cardinal Archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York, His Eminence Edward Michael Cardinal Egan, by protestors whose message will be paraphrased in part here. (Please note, the following opinions expressed **ARE NOT**, I repeat **NOT** the opinions of the author. I would never use such loathsome vile and reprehensible terms to refer to any one. So please do not send me hate mail.)

The group protesting at this most solemn of events was the Westboro Baptist Church, a radical hate group hailing from Kansas, and with a reputation for being incredibly virulent against those who do not agree with them. Throughout the entire service they were outside screaming about this was God's punishment for the United States because they harbor homosexuals, blacks, Jews, Roman Catholics and a multitude of other things. They stood outside the church with signs saying the most awful things, but the one that got the most attention was a sign saying 'Don't Worship the Dead, They Got What They Deserve!', and the media had a field day with the protestors and their sacrilegious statements. The leader of the WBC, Reverend Fred Phelps, and his family led a chant about how the terrorists would be 'praised eternally in Heaven for helping to destroy the fag enablers of the world', and no matter what was done to them, the 'dead from New York will burn forever in the Fires of Hell' and other nonsense like that. The hate rally ended when Maryland National Guard units forcefully broke up the rally and arrested Phelps and his family for child endangerment and public disturbance, as they had brought very young children along and was making quite a racket. The rest of the service was peaceful and dignified, as a decorous funeral should be and there were no further interruptions. Many people were moved to tears by the haunting strains of Amazing Grace being played on the bagpipes as they left the Basilica.

Clark AFB, Luzon, the Philippines

2200 GMT, 2 December 2001 (6:00 AM, 3 December 2001 Local)

Most of the world's military forces were still scrambling to get enough forces to cover their own interests, but the US Navy SEALs were ready all day, every day of the year. Even so, it had taken SEAL Team 1 nearly three days to get all of their paraphernalia and personnel to their FOB at Clark, and they did not even get any down time. They had been ordered to HALO drop into Taipei and act as an additional line of resistance around the capital of the Republic of China. The commandant of SEAL Team 1, Vice-Admiral Delilah Porter would stay behind at Clark to coordinate air strikes against the enemy with SEAL movements. Staying behind would be one of the bright spots of the assignment for her, not because she didn't want to fight, but because she would be with her husband, the hazel-eyed commanding officer of the 509th Bomb Wing, who has been mentioned numerous times before, Lieutenant General Jeremy Porter. She was also in charge of all United States forces in the whole of the South China Sea operational area, much to the Third US Army Rangers battalions dislike. She would be in control of the South China Seas area until the Coalition appointed a joint commander for all Coalition forces in the area. Moreover, that looked to be far off into the future that is at least if the Coalition could not become organized in the next few months.

Delilah Porter was a sensation in the Navy; she had appeared out of nowhere just over twenty years ago, and she was the first female SEAL, and the first female SEAL to make it up into the command echelon of the military. She stood at five foot nine, had blood red hair and a face that could easily deceive you into thinking that she would pose no threat. However, she was one of the deadliest people on the planet, and she could chew you up and spit you back out in seconds. Her bright emerald eyes shone with astuteness and understanding, but in their depths, you could also find hurt and trepidation, which when looked for a second time had disappeared. She could hit a fast-moving target 50 feet away dead center with a throwing knife, and was as precise a sharpshooter as any other human being alive was. She was unhurried to rage, but when aroused her anger dwarfed a volcano's fury and made it look like an angry butterfly. She dealt with the troops under her command as mother lion would her cubs, with respect but also with the position of superlative authority behind her. She shared her husband's fears about discovery by the world they had forsaken, but unlike her husband, she did not fixate on the subject of it; she rightly claimed it to be detrimental to one's mental health.

The first thing she did when she arrived at Clark was to make sure that the Air Force had the C-130 transport planes for her SEALs ready to go wheels up at a moments notice. She knew that every minute one of the people under her authority had nothing to do mean there was more chance they would try to take French leave, and they might not come back to do their duty. The second thing she did was to check on the status of her husband, and she was relieved that he had not been in one of the bombers that had been shot down over Taiwan. In addition, the last thing she did before helping to unload the heavy equipment was to make sure that the USS Abraham Lincoln was going to make to the theatre in time for the covering maneuver. Without total air preeminence, doing a HALO parachute jump would just be sending good soldiers to their deaths for no reason. When she found out that, the Lincoln was in Pearl Harbor for repairs due to hitting a reef she started swearing a blue streak that went on for a couple of miles. She testily postponed the HALO jump, and her staff wisely avoided her for the rest of the morning, lest they get flambéed by the 'Dragon Lady' as they had begun to call her when she went like this. There was one unlucky Air Force sergeant however, who either could not read the caveat signs or did not care about them; either way he spent the rest of the day cowering in a bathroom stall hoping that she didn't come after him.

Cargo terminal C2, Domodedova International Airport, Moscow, Russia

0127 GMT (4:27 AM), 3 December 2001

The worst kinds of surprises are those that come unexpectedly, and leave a place in ruins when they leave. Civilizations since the beginning of time have experienced these nasty kinds of surprises; Greece had the Roman Empire; Rome had the barbarian hordes from the Baltic and Asia; and now Russia would fight against its own demolishment from both without and within. Inside this freight terminal at Domodedova, there were six freight containers, each one packed with enough weapons to supply a small mobile infantry company. These had been left in the secured area of the terminal by Soviet hard-liners just over ten ago, who were planning to come back some time in the future to continue the grand Soviet Empire. Unfortunately, for them, most of the leaders of the plot were captured soon after Boris Yeltsin came into power and were serving life sentences at a gulag in northern Siberia. One of the strategic leaders of the plot however, had been able to deflect any suspicion from his person by claiming that he had just been following orders. Fortunately, for him at least, the Russian judges believed his story, allowed him to retain his rank of Colonel, and even allowed him to stay at his job as a missile commander. Now he is the Russian equivalent to the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first in line to succeed the Presidency, and he could whisper any number of things into the ear of Vladimir Putin. This man's name is Anatoliy Gyrzlev and through him, the world would feel terror, sorrow, and grief.

Anatoliy Gryzlev was a cunning man, with a mind as sharp as razor and quick as lightning. He could see that the time would soon be ripe for him to overthrow the capitalist 'democracy', which had reduced a once great nation into an economically struggling, divided 'federation' of independent states. He was meeting with the leaders of the Russian Mafia and some sympathetic military leaders to plan the overthrow of the so-called 'Commonwealth of Independent States' that all those in attendance hated so much. However, as I said Gyrzlev is a cunning man, he lives by the aphorism 'if you're not three steps ahead, you're two steps behind' and he did not trust any of the men he was meeting any more than they trusted him. He knew that for his plans to accomplish something, he would need to use these criminals and then eliminate them quickly, at before they did the same to him. He had lead these men here to furnish them with the weapons that would allow him create a situation in which he could 'legally' take over the Presidency. He knew that having a massive coup d'etat such as in the glorious October Revolution of 1917 would only cause the superpowers of the world to brand him as a traitor and make him anathema to political peace. He did not intend to join the Dark Lord's forces however; he was just in this to restore the glorious name of the Soviet Empire and the spread Communism throughout the world. The meeting went well, and within six months, the plans for the fall of the consumerist masters of the Russian workers would be in place and ready to start at any time.

Jackson, Mississippi, the United States

0331 GMT, 3 December 2001 (9:31 PM, 2 December 2001)

The domestic situation in the United States, and around the world for that matter, was one that would see many changes in a very sort amount of time. With most of the world's economy having been destroyed, the common person, from the greeters at Wal-Mart to the managers of local McDonalds had all been told that their pay was worth substantially less then it was before. Understandably, the general populace did not take this revelation very well nor did they want to try to make do with what they were getting. The first riot occurred outside a grocery store in Jackson, Mississippi, where people quickly found out that the prices on all items had raised to practically astronomical levels. The people as you can probably guess were more than a little unhappy with the new list prices on the necessities that they had to have. It started innocuously as most civil disobedience actions do, but as they crowd got larger the general mood of the mob changed from one of discontentment to one of unadulterated rage. The mob grew more and more unruly, and the breaking point came when somebody threw a brick into the stores front window. The mob surged forward and stormed the workers of the grocery, who barricaded the front of the store, but their efforts were for naught.

The anger over the high price of food quickly lost its focus and the mob turned into an all out riot, moving through Jackson destroying dozens of businesses and hundreds of homes. Next, the mob came across some unfortunate wizards who had thought that since the magical world revealed itself to the mundanes, they could now go freely about both worlds. Unfortunately, for both the wizards and the riotous people, the phrase 'mob mentality' is more than just a phrase; it had become the force that ruled them. The wizards were quickly recognized for what there were, dressed in their traditional robes, and holding wands all the while. The raging crowd quickly surrounded them, and though they fought back to the best of their magical ability, they were being pushed by the crowds towards a large hill. It had been said that in the 1880s that several lynching parties had taken place on this hill, and now it looked like it would be used again. The wizards were no stranger to capital punishment and had heard about the barbaric past of the Deep South, but they though that that time ended a long before this. The tried to resist as hard as they could but one by one, they fell unconscious after being struck in the head and the mob continued with its terrible deed. The next morning the twelve bodies were still hanging from the trees, but minus their hands, feet, eyes, ears and tongue. From here on out the domestic situation could only get worse, and it surely did as time went on.

Psych ward, Maximum-security medical facility, outside of Munich, Germany

0815 GMT (9:15 AM), 3 December 2001

The doctors and psychologist of the Federal Republic of Germany were utterly baffled by the Prisoner of War known as Ginny Weasley. The first time she had woken up it had taken three MPs, two orderlies and 1500 cc of Thorazine to get her under control again. Even then, she was not out completely; through the drug-induced slumber, the doctors could hear her muttering about midgets spanking men covered in Thousand Island dressing, and other bizarre situations. She also seemed to have multiple personality disorder because she persisted in having conversations with somebody named Tom. However, the most worrisome thing of all was the amount of anger she held within her mind; she took the words hyper-aggressive to an entirely new level. Moreover, all of her anger seemed to focus on one person, although the doctors had yet to discover who this person was, for she only referred to the person as 'Him'. One thing they did know was that if she ever got out, the world would be in very big trouble, and she could cause massive amounts of destruction. The doctors were just glad that Bundeswehr issued them all several sidearms, because they would at least some protection from the nutcase known as Satan's playmate.

A/N: In this chapter, we begin to see the dark side of humanity, and I touch on several subjects that some people might find objectionable. I would like to say though that the Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps, and the actions that I have portrayed them performing are true to life. These people go around the country to military funerals and claim that 9/11 and the battle deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are God's punishment of America for harboring homosexuals. I would like to state categorically that I have absolutely no problems with homosexuals, or people of any race, creed or religion. When I started this story, I promised myself that I would go through all of the skeletons in humanities closet and let people see the true depth of human depravity. I do this not to depress you, but to let people know that there is another way, that we can make the world a better place, if we just stop pussy-footing around the past and tried to change our own prejudices. I thank you for you time and wish you good reading.


	12. De Opresso Liber

A/N: I would like to thank all my reviewers, and those who continue to read this, even though it does not follow the normal fanfic pattern. However, I would like to know what you think of my work, so please review. By the way, this chapter has almost seven pages and over 3500 words of pure story, enjoy.

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the United States

1130 GMT (6:30 AM EST), 3 December 2001

The commander of the United States Army Special Forces brigade, more commonly known as the Green Berets, was nearly at the end of his rope. The Army Chief of Staff and the President were asking the impossible, and this time the Green Berets could not pull off what they were asking the Berets to do. Most of the active duty units under his command had already shipped out to forward operating cases around the globe and the rest were severely under-strength. He had decided to put out a general call to all former Green Berets under the age of 55 and would ask them to return to the service; at least until recruitment numbers went up enough to replace the men that called back to active duty. The first of the calls had gone out in the early morning hours and confirmations from all over the West Coast were coming in droves. There were more than four thousand former Green Berets under 55 on the West Coast alone, and they would be called up in sections to provide for easier coordination of transportation. Even though the brigade was hard up for men and material, they would not relax their standards to allow just anybody in to the Greenie Beanies. They only took the best of the best, and the high standards of discipline and training would not be relaxed ever.

Makeshift hospital center, near Suffolk, the United Kingdom

1324 GMT, 3 December 2001

Hermione Granger had seen a lot of suffering in her career as a healer for St. Mungo's but the sheer devastation she saw now eclipsed all that she had seen before. When the British Army rescued her from the radioactive hell that had once been the city of London, she thought that she had seen the worst day of her life. However, life it seems likes to make all situations bad, then worse, and this was just par for the course. When the army heard that she was the equivalent of an MD, they enlisted her help in treating the survivors from the outskirts of London. She had seen people with their skin peeling off their bodies in huge sections, and she herself was already displaying some of the symptoms of radiation poisoning, namely her hair was falling out in large clumps. The radiation quarantine zone extended farther and farther each day, sometimes by miles, other times by no more than a single kilometer, but the constant influx of patients made all the doctors almost dead on their feet. However, the worst thing about the continuous moving of the quarantine boundaries was that mass amounts of equipment was misplaced or mislabeled and then not found until after it usefulness had passed.

Most of the pharmaceutical supplies that found in every town they passed would not be used because before anything was used, a Geiger counter was taken to the lot to see if there were dangerous levels of radiation about. This however made for a very sparsely stocked hospital and for a very poor medical center with little real capacity to provide emergency healthcare. As more and more refugees came to the quarantine tents, the logistical side of the equation quickly overwhelmed the side of practicality, and soon, only the most critical of patients could be treated. The doctors and healers who had survived the nuclear blasts did not like this one iota, as it went directly against their Hippocratic oaths, which were one thing that both worlds had in common. Although the understood the necessity of limiting the use of their supplies to those who truly needed them, the physicians natural empathy called them to help all they could. However, as half of them were themselves prisoners of the quarantine tents, the amount of help they could be was limited to those with severe radiation burns, but those were short in both number and lifespan. Their talents, if used elsewhere, at least in their opinion, might save countless lives, but until the Geiger counters indicated they were back down to a safe level of radiation, they were stuck in the quarantine.

Salem, Oregon, the United States

1532 GMT (7:32 AM PST), 3 December 2001

Jeff Strauser had been on edge for the past few days, not only because of the attack on his person by the sympathizers of the dark lord, but because of the threats, he had been receiving by e-mail. He did not recognize the senders address but the content was some of the worst trash imaginable. The person sending the mail, was apparently a stalker of his wife, Angela, and not just a harmless admirer, this person made it their business to know everything about his wife, right down to the style of underwear she bought. Normally this would not have worried Jeff very much, as his wife was well versed in the martial arts, and was a terrific swordswoman, and she was handy with a gun as well. However, he had re-enlisted back into the Army Special Forces brigade and he was naturally worried about his wife and their children. The emails sent to him detailed what the psycho would do to his children if he ever got his hands on them, and just the mental images made one want to throw up. He got ready to leave for the airport, for although he was a wizard, and a powerful one at that, he had never liked the magical transportation methods. Before he left, he told Angela to watch out for any suspicious characters and to keep a close eye on the kids, and he told her to read the emails in the evidence folder on the computer. After that, he hoped that Angela might be able to figure who the nutcase who was watching her was, and would get him locked up for good.

Dublin, the Republic of Ireland

1847 GMT, 3 December 2001

The nation of Ireland had not lasted more than a few hours after the nuclear blasts, as the Dark Lord had moved swiftly and seized control of the government and the Irish Republican Army. He had been in parlay with IRA leaders for some time now, but he had seen the attacks as the perfect opportunity for him to seize the first part of his grand empire. His forces, in the early hours of the war, were dispersed throughout the British Isles, but now they were mostly concentrated in the land of Ireland, and they were quickly making the island a fortress that would withstand the forces of both nature and the Coalition. The sheer magnitude of the constructions planned precluded the use of only magical manufacture, so an unconventional supply of labor became the primary assembly detail: slave labor. The non-magical peoples of Ireland quickly pressed into service, built the fortifications that would imprison them, from both the outside and from within. Thousands would die from the backbreaking labor forced upon them, and the conditions did not help any. They received rations of two pints of water a day, and an extremely thin soup for dinner, and if they were lucky, moldy bread and rotten fruit. It seemed that the dark lord had taken his lessons in prisoner care from the records of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, and he felt no compunction over the deaths of those under him.

Baghdad, Iraq

2059 GMT (11:59 PM), 3 December 2001

The relative peace and stability in the nine years since the ousting of Saddam Hussein shattered, and in its wake came a civil war of epic proportions. Baath party loyalists lead by Saddam and his sons had attacked the palace where President Omar Nasser and his family were residing, and killed them all in a bloody coup, something that had been happening quite often lately. The social progress in Iraq was set back centuries in only a few hours, and the human rights record of the Iraqi people became sullied once again. There had been relative peace in the last three years, after the time when Iraq had become a banana republic of sorts, and for once, it seemed that the Shiites and Sunni's just might get along for more then half an hour at a time. However, the Baathists caused all of that progress to disappear in only a few hours, and soon Saddam Hussein was back in power and Baghdad, after hiding out in Tikrit since his overthrow. His first order of business was to bring Iraq back to the 'good old days', meaning that in elections you either vote for him or you face the gallows. The council members that had run the Iraqi Islamic Republic in conjunction with the President since the banana republic days soon were executed with extreme prejudice and their families were tortured to death and back. It would be several days before the change in leadership became apparent and by then, the world had other problems to deal with.

Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the United States

0125 GMT, 4 December 2001 (8:25 PM, 3 December 2001)

The 101st Airborne Division was one of the frontline units that were leaving for the European theatre of operations, to protect American interests in the region. The first Brigade Combat Team was one of the few units of the United States military at full strength as it was participating in a series of war-games in the Georgia-Tennessee area. The 'Bastogne' brigade, as the men affectionately called it, would first be heading to France to help evacuate American personnel from the country and to give the French army a backbone. Some of the men of the 101st thought that the frogs could definitely use a force to keep them at the front lines, and to make sure that they did not decide to take French leave in the middle of the night. They would be going over in the Wasp class amphibious assault ships, Wasp, Kearsarge, Baatan and Iwo Jima, and they would dock in Cherbourg, where most of the evacuees would be herded. After the last of the evacuees were loaded onto the transports, then the 101st would head toward the front, wherever it would be at the time, and they would delay the invading forces. The troops hoped the French would put up more resistance than they did in June 1940 against the Germans, and they could avoid Paris being captured twice within a century, although the general sentiment was that the French were cheese eating surrender monkeys. Nevertheless, the men and women of the 101st were hoping that the French would be an effective fighting force, at least once their lives, and be able to keep most of France under French control.

Ulan Bator, Mongolia

0341 GMT (11:41 AM), 4 December 2001

The president of Mongolia, Natsagiyn Bagabandi, was facing a major problem; the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, formerly a province of the PRC, had asked to rejoin the true Mongolian state. Normally Natsagiyn would have jumped at this chance, but with all the problems in the world, and the Coalition making an enemy of anyone that seems to use the war for their own gain, he hesitated to make a decision on the offer. However, his people had heard of the request and they were pressuring him to move in as quickly as he humanly could. What the people of Mongolia did not understand was how bad this would look to the nations of the world, and how it would paint his entire administration with a broad black brush. He would rather have just been able to tell the citizens that he had decided to reserve judgment, and that be the end of the matter. Unfortunately, elected by a democratic society, he could easily be fired by the same process he was elected by, and as most politicians, his priorities went him first, everybody else second. He could either move in and be called a warmonger, or wait and be called a coward, neither of which particularly appealed to his ego. As much as he would have loved to put a decision on hold indefinitely, the populace would not allow him the luxury of time. Most of the Mongolians still held to the conviction that land is the basis of all power, and such an immense accumulation of land would mean that they would be an impressive nation. The Mongolian army had already begun moving through the Gobi towards the border, where they would wait for the go-order from the high command.

Tokyo, Japan

0637 GMT (3:37 PM), 4 December 2001

Abe Shinzo, the Prime Minister of Japan, was in a teleconference with the United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Foreign Minister of the Republic of China, and the President of South Korea. The main topic of discussion was what would happen when the weather over the islands of Japan cleared up, and there was no real consensus on anything. The Japanese seemed to think that the North Koreans would strike hard and fast toward Tokyo, in order to take over the country as quickly as possible. The South Koreans had come to the conclusion that Kim Jong Il would focus instead on the South, and try to 'reunite' the wayward of the South to the 'glorious' North. The ROC tried not to take a side but they favored the Japanese opinion, much to the dismay of the South Koreans. The United States was trying to fit into its role as the keeper of the peace in the world, but without sheer manpower in the region, they were mostly ineffectual as peacekeepers. All four nations were pushing their own agendas, and none of them was willing to consider the validity of the others position, or the fact that the North might do something entirely unexpected. The Japanese and South Koreans were at loggerheads with each other, and they were both jockeying for position as the main concern of the United States, while the ROC was confidently self-assured that the US would put the most effort into helping them out of their pickle first. If the situation were not so serious, you would almost think it to be some kind of a skit on SNL or MADTV, but here no one was laughing.

After several hours of argument, the Japanese began to see that until the South Korean army, and the forces of Dongbei had been defeated, the North Koreans were certainly not in any position to invade the Japanese islands for at least six to eight months. The United States was very concerned about the ROC and the fight to keep them free, but they had already assigned the _Abraham Lincoln_ carrier task force to the defense of the ROC. However, they would in an effort to placate the other two parties, send three Montana class battleships and an America class battlecruiser to the Sea of Japan. They would augment the South Korean navy and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, and provide a support to any amphibious operations launched while they were in the area. They would be under the command of the joint task force commander for the Sea of Japan region, a Japanese admiral. The US would also send over a Marine Force Recon battalion to act as defensive units, and the Air Force escalated in the coming months. It would take almost four months for all the troops and equipment to arrive in the Japanese bases.

At 980 feet long, the Montana class was the largest battleship class ever built, and they had enough firepower to tip the balance decidedly in the Japanese' favor. Their main armament were sixteen 18-inch guns, which could fire half ton shells almost fifty kilometers, and 12 dual 5-inch gun turrets for close in-support. The Montana, Maine, and Texas would sail from San Diego Naval Base and could be in the Sea of Japan in a little less than a week at their top speed of 40 knots. The America class battlecruiser was another WWII relic, but it could outgun almost any ship on the ocean. Its massive 20-inch guns sent shells flying over 50 kilometers and they had phenomenal accuracy even when firing at maximum range. The _USS Valorous_ would be sailing from Pearl Harbor and would be in the area within three days at their full speed of 37 knots. Both ship classes could attain such high speeds because nuclear reactors, put in during the Reagan administration as part of a total refit of both designs, powered them. When both groups were together, they would join with the Japanese navy for detached duty, and later reshuffle back into the US Navy deck.

Former Biopreparat laboratory, Sverdlovsk, Russia

0903 GMT (2:03 PM), 4 December 2001

The Russians were identifying where the smallpox pandemic that started in Ankara came, that is to say, who made the actual virus, for it was clearly not a wild strain. Within a day of the first confirmed cases, there were also the first confirmed deaths, and they were gruesome. Almost all of the cases seen by the Ankara medical staff described hemorrhagic smallpox, an extremely deadly type, perfectly, and the incubation time was extremely short for a smallpox virus, at only four days. The large ratio of hemorrhagic smallpox was one thing that sent a red flag, as that particular type of smallpox infection usually occurs only one time in 8000 infections, and almost ninety percent of the cases recorded so far were of this specific type. There were almost three thousand people confirmed dead in 17 countries and on three continents, and with every minute the disease spread to some new part of the world. The technicians at building 273 had a lot of experience working with diseases like this, as they had bioengineered almost 600 different strains under the orders of the Soviet government. What disturbed them more than anything else was that they had made a bioweapon with these exact properties almost thirty years ago, and it supposedly was destroyed on orders from the United Nations Security Council in 1982. They hadn't seen this type of strain since then, and they were glad of it; the work they did in those days gave them nightmares, both then and now.

When the genetic sequencers finished deciphering the complex RNA inside the viral capsid protein, the results made most of the older techs turn paper-white. They remembered every killer virus that came out of their labs, and this was one of the worst ever produced by human hands. This had been a masterwork, the Last Supper of bioweaponry, a virus that killed quickly, spread with every single breath and with no cure; it was designed to be a last resort weapon and the ultimate trump card. However, the existence of such a dangerous disease could not stay a secret for very long, and a Chinese agent told the world of the super bug developed by the Soviet Union. The world as a whole condemned the Soviets for creating such a thing, but all the while gazing jealously at the perfect germ and frantically wondering how they could make one. Thus is the duplicity of the world superpowers, they revile while reproducing what they condemn others for making. The Komitet Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti, better known as the KGB, had confiscated the virus before the United Nations got their hands on it and had reportedly 'eradicated' the super bug. Now the techs and geneticists knew that the KGB had ferreted the cultures away somewhere and had in all likelihood forgotten where they where, and some radical had discovered them and was now using them for their own nefarious purposes.

The virus had been confiscated and 'destroyed' so quickly, that the biologists in charge of the project had not been able to create even a precursor vaccine, or try any form of treatment, except to verify that the usual drug regimen was ineffective. One drug seemed to have a mild effect on the virus, azithromycin, a macrolide antibiotic, but usually the change was only that the patient did not die, but lived in excruciating pain and died of complications, not the disease. Now, however, they had a mandate from Vladimir Putin himself, and they had to pull through on this one; they were to find some combination of antibiotics and other remedies that provided a potential prevention and/or cure. Unfortunately, right after the KGB confiscated the virus, they took all the records as to how the virus formed, so the actual changes made to the viral RNA were yet another mystery to solve quickly. The first thing done was to compare the RNA sequences to most of the major viruses and look for any similarities, which might help in finding a cure. When that was done, they would have an idea as to where to begin looking for a cure, or at least a treatment. With that in hand, they might be able to contain the outbreak before it mutated on its own into something even more deadly, or it escaped into the wild and made a happy home in some animal species, just waiting to spring up.


	13. No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

Just over 15 miles east of Newcastle, the North Sea

1356 GMT, 4 December 2001

The French fleet had arrived early and were preparing for the coming battle by loading the guns, doing some last minute maintenance and other general repairs and readiness checks. Aboard the destroyer Montcalm, the Exocet missile launchers were being loaded with the first salvo of four missiles. Since they had arrived, they had had the company of the Royal Navy destroyers Manchester, Gloucester, Edinburgh, and York, and had been going over the battle plans with command crews from the aforementioned vessels. What set the crews on-edge was how there had been nothing of the ordinary coming from the city at all, not even so much as a bonfire. However, from all appearances, the city was in absolute chaos, and it seemed that only military intervention could restore the city to order. It was at this time that the HMS Ark Royal arrived and the land-based forces signaled that all was in readiness, so the ships got into formation and turned their guns toward the city. As soon as the last destroyer had raised its guns into position, the formation let loose with a massive torrent of gunfire, and Exocet missiles leapt out of their launchers. Each individual shell screamed out of the barrels at just over Mach 2.2, and the Exocets swiftly accelerated to their ultimate speed of 315 meters per second.

It took less than a minute for the five-inch diameter shells to cover the distance of fifteen miles, and whenever and wherever they hit a titanic column of smoke and fire erupted out of the earth very soon after. It took considerably longer for the Exocets to traverse the fifteen miles, but they caused substantially more damage than their counterpart fire with their 165-kilogram HE warheads and individual guidance systems. After thirty minutes of bombardment, the destroyers ceased their fire and the air assault began from the Ark Royal. The flight crews had been on the deck of the carrier watching the destroyers' fire round after round towards Newcastle, cheering the lads on whenever they scored a good hit. Now it was they who would be getting the cheers, and they would be ridding the world of a terrible evil while attacking their own nation, which they were trying not to think about now. They climbed into the cockpits of their GR.9 Harrier VTOL aircraft and as soon as the jets had revved up they leapt straight off the deck and into the sky. The first three flights of six Harriers in each flight, loaded to the gills with bombs of every size conceivable, flew over the city, and as they did, they relieved themselves of their deadly cargo and then returned to the carrier to load up again. This went on for almost another half-hour, and then came the parachute troops turn, and the relatively most dangerous part of the operation so far. The parachute landing had the potential to be one of the worst in the history of warfare, as the winds around the city were erratic in both direction and speed, which made parachutist operations very risky. The troops could fall in the ocean and drown before they could get clear of their lines, or they might fall in the middle of the city and get their chutes snagged on tall buildings. However, contingency plans had been made for this type of situation and they would allow for safe landings and successful assaults… at least that was the hope.

Two minutes after the fleet signaled that it was time for Force Sigma to take the scene, almost six hundred special operations forces boarded 10 C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft based in southwestern England. In a little less than an hour, they were over the drop zone and two by two, they began jumping out the open back of the plane and tumbled off into the jet stream at an altitude of approximately ten thousand feet. As each parachutist fell towards the earth, each one maneuvered them self to keep in sight of their comrades, and their squad leaders, and at about a thousand feet above the ground they pulled the ripcords to their chutes and by 700 feet they were floating peacefully towards the ground at a gentle 20 mph. As soon as they hit the ground, they let their legs crumple beneath them to cushion the impact, and in less than forty seconds, they were up off the ground and ready to fight for queen and country. Now we join a specific soldier, and we shall follow his progress through the next few hours; this soldier's name is Harry James Potter. Harry was one of the first on the ground, and it was his job as section leader to make sure the rest of his troops got on the ground okay. Once that function of the job was accomplished, he lead the way towards the metropolitan area, because the prevailing wind conditions had scattered their drop a bit, and they had ended up about ten clicks away from the actual city. As they got closer to the city, the magical components of the group felt the tingle of anti-apparition and anti-portkey wards that they had set up before the barrage to keep the enemy from escaping in-between the bombing, shelling and the Paratroop landings.

As they moved through the English suburbs, the main emotion from those they met while marching was confusion, and there seemed to be a bit of anger as well. With the confusion came some extremely troubling questions asked by the townsfolk, the most disturbing of which was 'why the hell are you invading your own country' as one middle-aged man so delicately put it, right before he was tackled to the ground. This sentiment and the question were repeated quite a few times, and it quickly became apparent that the townsfolk had had nothing but business as usual, which only increased the feeling amongst the troops that something, nothing they could put their fingers on, was very wrong there. The farther they got into the city, the more disquieting the situation became, as they found many destroyed buildings and dead civilians, but they did not see a single death eater body, anywhere in the streets or in the buildings they cleared and that was impossible. They cleared every corner building they went past, and station some people from first platoon to keep a look out for any enemy movement on the streets. After three hours of going through the city at a snail's pace, the three prongs of the assault force met up near the harbor, and they all had the same thing to report: nothing except destroyed buildings and dead civilians, both of which were most likely caused by the naval bombardment. It was clear that the reports given to the recon team and the military command stratum, entirely fabricated, were a massive and very deceptive ruse. It obviously meant to cause the Royal Navy and the British army attack defenseless citizens of their own country, causing a political nightmare and civil turbulence, and in this, it achieved its greatest effect. It was a masterfully executed piece of deception, on par with the famous Trojan horse in its cleverness and effectiveness, and it had certainly accomplished what it meant to do.

The team had expected to be fighting for up to two weeks, and if it had taken longer than that, the regular army would be called in to lend a hand in taking the city from the rebellious magical forces. Now however, they a full battalion of elite Special Forces with no mission, and no prospect of an assignment in the next few weeks because they expected to have been in support operations of the army. Throughout the entire 'assault' the collective total number of times a weapon had fired amounted to no more than eight, and five of those had been caused by happy trigger-fingers and non-existent noises heard in alleyways. It was either the single greatest achievement in the history of land warfare, or the most embarrassing and perfect deception since the battle of Vicksburg in the American Civil War. Almost immediately people started pointing fingers at one another, they all started screaming out how they were not the guilty party here, and each one of them knew that someone would be wrung out to dry for this debacle. The debate quickly moved into a nearby pub that was still intact, and the pub had record business as everyone who could fit in the establishment became thoroughly plastered, which they really needed. The so-called happy hour lasted for the rest of the day and well into the night, and the next morning the beleaguered troops had hangovers that lasted until the following week.

Toulon Naval base, Toulon, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France

1847 GMT (7:47 PM EST), 4 December 2001

It had taken nearly three days to gather all the sailors of the French Charles de Gaulle battle group from the various bars and wineries around Toulon, and it had taken a further day to alleviate them of the unbridled alcoholism that had taken much of the military by storm. The military had heard about the freeze on their paychecks, and in consequence, almost ninety-eight percent of them decided to go on a bender of insane magnitude, because if they were going to hazard casualty to their person, they should at least be paid for it in their reasoning. The high command had a very different view of the situation however, and that view was directly at odds with that of the common military service member. Naturally, when the various commanders of the military issued the orders that restricted military personnel to their respective bases, the subordinates paid them no heed, and the local police forces rectified the situation. Now the French navy was preparing to sail for positions in the English Channel, to hassle the Dutch and Danish aggressors, and to be an all-purpose aid to Coalition forces in the vicinity. The four Rubis class nuclear submarines FS Rubis, Casablanca, Améthyste, and Perle would lead the way acting as a screen and afterwards join the USS Valhalla on tour of duty in the North Sea. The FS Charles de Gaulle would take a position about 70 miles north-northwest of London and would serve as an anchor for conferences between the different arms of the various national militaries.

The French Army would be moving relatively quickly to the Northeast of the country to counteract the Dutch forces moving across the Belgian border. However, like most of the world, the French held no illusions as to their combat effectiveness being even average nor that their leaders were particularly bright, the latter being wondered about quite often. Even in simulated combat environments, the upper French army commands were obnoxiously cautious, and once they even surrendered… to civilian police who were not even involved in the exercise. That was not even the tragically sad part of the tale, for the captain who had surrendered a full infantry company to civilians, found himself soon after _promoted_ to the rank of colonel, instead of attending his own dishonorable discharge hearing, as he should have. In short, the men and women of the French armed forces tried desperately not to remember that large black mark on their history or anything related it, and in general, they categorically denied it ever happened, even when talking to the man it happened to. Thankfully, the largest part of the French command echelon had more intelligence and bravery than that particular yellow-bellied coward, and they were much more competent in command than the moron of a colonel was as well. Overall, the French forces hoped they would be able to push the comparatively small Dutch army back through Belgium and then take care of the Dutch on their own soil, without the aid of the other militaries of the European Union, but they doubted they would.

Southampton, England, the United Kingdom

2042 GMT, 4 December 2001

The scene inside the temporary capital was almost comical, as people watched television screens showing a broadcast of CNN, detailing a video they had just received that was apparently from the Dark Lord. The tape, sent directly into the office of Ted Turner via portkey, had on it proof that the dark lord was entirely round the twist or very, very stupid, or possibly both. The content of the tape was one that nigh on made it a certainty that the Coalition would receive the aid of Israeli forces and near unanimous support from Jews from all nations on the planet. When the actual recording played, several people burst out into uproarious hilarity at the language used, which was neither lewd nor coarse in temperament but lacked all sense of diplomacy. The main phrase reiterated several times by the Dark Lord, who was the orator on the video, was that he was the enactor of the 'Final Solution' to the quandary of the mundane peoples of the world and the magical peoples who sprung from their stock. He called upon all the magical peoples of the world to rise up and join him in his inevitable triumph, and those who chose to resist him would die in the most horrible manner conceivable. Although the severity of the communication was somewhat blunted by the fact that the Dark Lord looked almost exactly like the American singer, Michael Jackson, albeit without a nose and with bizarre eyes. By the end of the broadcast, the Queen was seriously considering sending Lord Voldemort a basket of fruit in thanks for securing the Coalition another valuable ally… and just to make him madder than a wet hen as secondary reason.

Istanbul, Turkey

2307 GMT, 4 December 2001 (1:07 AM, 5 December 2001)

The terrorists responsible for the bombing of the medical facilities located at the Hagia Sophia had been caught near midnight, and they were quickly convicted by an irate mob in the streets of the city, and sentenced to death soon after. The few police on duty at that time of night were of little help in quelling the anger of the lawless crowd; their remarks about sending them to the city jail and allowing real justice to take place only exacerbated the ire of the rabble. Soon, they were to share the fate of the terrorists who they were previously defending, because someone irrationally declared the police to be in complicity with the criminals, as the police officers attempted to save the murderers from their rightful fate. Within the hour, there were twenty broken and bloodied bodies hanging from lampposts around the city, and when daylight broke, the city started to tear itself apart. When the police forces saw their comrades strung up with no respect for the uniform, they quickly broke out the heavy weapons available to them and went on a witch-hunt -no pun intended- for the perpetrators. They met the reveling crowd, soon a fully pitched battle waged across the streets, and angry mob met angry police. Some of the police were downed by lucky shots, and very rapidly, they were stripped of their assault rifles and body armor, which then protected the rabble assaulting the police. After three hours of battle, the mutinous crowd came out on top, and soon the little riot took on a cause far from its original intent. Socialist revolutionaries seized upon the peoples anger at their governments failure to protect them from terror and their despair over the economic situation, and whipped them into a seditious frenzy. The movement soon gained strength and size as more and more people joined in, venting their frustrations over increasingly minor problems and their seemed to be no end in sight to this social insurrection.

Albany, New York, the United States

0015 GMT, 5 December 2001 (7:15 PM EST)

Unlike the ruins of London, what remained of New York City had remained unexplored due mainly to the torrential precipitation system surrounding the area that had made nearly all motor vehicle travel impossible. Only the most sturdy and powerful of vehicles could make their way safely through the flooded streets, and the mud that had a staying power similar to super glue. The rain had not let up for ten days, this had the unfortunate effect of irradiating just about everything within sixty-five miles of NYC, and it killed off about 40 of the plant life in the area. The entirety of the New York National Guard reassigned to active duty, and almost one-third of those forces would be searching for survivors in the wreckage and the ruins of NYC and the surrounding area, and stabilizing the explosive circumstances in the area. The few vehicles on-hand at the staging area that could make it safely through the weather conditions were four M60A3 Patton tanks, three Bradley assault vehicles and a platoon of eight M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks, so the capacity to move troops into the affected areas was strictly truncated. With the vehicle forces anticipated to arrive in the next three days, the transportation capacity of the rescue force would increase by about 600, and their capability to fight out battles with any challenging force they might meet would increase by a factor of twelve. However, they had received orders from the governor that stated they were to move into the area without further ado and with extreme haste, whether they were ready or not. As each of the vehicles heavy diesel engines started up, the crews thought about the downright lunacy of sending tanks into burned out neighborhoods and areas where people would not, and most likely could not, fight them.

The commander of the expedition force, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Longstreet of the United States Marines, was furious that command had relegated him to a mission that was more of a babysitting job than anything else was. He had received commendations for tactical excellence and superior command ability at the Virginia Military Institute, and now his talents wasted on missions that any monkey in a uniform could perform perfectly. He wanted to strike back at the people who had incinerated his mother, father and younger sister along with every body else in the Lower East side of Queens, but he was told by his commanders to get grief counseling. After almost three days of constant arguing with his commanders, somebody finally put him on probation and told that if he wanted to stay at his current rank, then he had better shut up. There was a bright light at the end of the tunnel though, as his commanders had promised him that if he worked without complaint for the next three months, they would transfer him the First Division and into a combat command. He had also extracted from them a promise to put him in charge of one the first operational M1A3 battalions the Marine Corps were sending over to Southeast Asia, a choice assignment in anyone's book. Slated for an assignment in the Far East and a command position of one the best armor units on the face of the globe, he was willing to allow this insult to his command ability and intelligence to slide.


	14. Into the Wild Blue Yonder

About 610 km above the South China Seas

0519 GMT (1:19 PM local time), 6 December 2001

The Michael Collins space defense station had just arrived in orbit over the South China Seas, and the radar had gone crazy with contacts all the way from southern central Russia to southern Tasmania. From Russia, they could see the combat air patrols flying near the border and making small forays into Mongolian and ex-PRC territory, although none so far as to spark an international incident. From the Korean sector, there were hundreds of blips on the screens, some so close together, that you could not tell whether they were red or blue, and it looked like the South Koreans were fighting a losing battle. The typhoon heading for Japan had dissipated almost as quickly as it had appeared in the Pacific, causing all militaries affected quite a few headaches, as their plans had all been made around the storm, because they couldn't go safely through it. It turned out that the South Koreans had been accurate in their consideration of the North Korean objectives, as the campaign heading north into the fledgling nation of Dongbei halted and almost half the troops quickly transferred to the southern front. With the massive surge of troops came a similarly large gain of ground; Seoul had been overrun in only eight hours, Osan AFB about two hours after that, and at the end of the day, a little more than half of the South was in the custody on the KPA. It was blitzkrieg, and most of the personnel and equipment at Osan and Seoul evacuated at the last possible moment, although two of the B-1R Lancer airframes were unable to make it to the far-end of the runway, so they had to be destroyed via C4.

The Chinese invasion of Taiwan had advanced to the point where almost half the island was under the dominion of the neo-communist forces, even with help from air strikes and ground forces from Vietnam, the Philippines and the United States. The Vietnamese, while communists themselves were also exceptionally defensive of the status quo of the region contiguous to their country, and thus they became extremely irritated with the Chinese opportunists actions. They had quickly sent troops to aid the neighboring Taiwanese, which served a dual purpose in showing the world that they were a nation to respect and to warn off Chinese attacks on the homeland. When the whole situation examined, it looked like the Vietnamese had harnessed their wagon to a falling star, as the defense of Taiwan, executed by four different nations and three very different plans, made a very poor showing. The Americans wanted to go in with shock and awe tactics and then smash the invaders with everything in their arsenal, while the Taiwanese wanted to draw the Chinese into a trap, while the Vietnamese wanted to make a controlled retreat to Tsoying. Moreover, the military commands of each country had not integrated with each other at all, so the military situation became a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left was screwing up.

The Chinese provinces had further consolidated into eight separate nations, each with a population of approximately 120 million and all with sufficient technology to manufacture nuclear warheads, and the associated deliverance systems. The new nations closer to the coast were the more belligerent of the newly formed countries and thus were the ones that would be more than likely to go to war over some pathetic excuse for a reason. This also meant that they were more likely to launch a nuclear attack in either first strike or in a retaliatory manner than any other nuclear capable state. It just so happened that the leader of the ultra-left state that had formed from the provinces of Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, and Henan, was an extraordinarily enthusiastic opponent of both the United States and Taiwan. Thus, when he saw the chance to exterminate over 45 million of his abhorrent adversaries, he leapt on the opportunity like a starving man on a Christmas ham, and the fact that he would kill millions of soldiers from another province was no matter to him. He quickly ordered his generals to launch four enhanced radiation weapons, also known as neutron bombs, at the island of Formosa, and after the radiation had become negligible, he would move in and take over. One hour after he had given the order, the four missiles were ripple fired from road-mobile, transporter-erector-launchers and the four missiles streaked off into the clear blue sky. As the missiles flew on deadly wings, the gimbaled rockets powering them slowly turned toward the area of their target, the center of the island of Formosa.

Mere seconds after the rocket motors on the first stage of the four missiles ignited, the sensors aboard the Collins relayed a ballistic missile launch warning to the Strategic Air Command satellite network and to all US battle commands within 1500 miles of the launch site. After only a few more seconds, the Collins minor maneuvering thrusters were locking the massive 35-megawatt main laser onto the missile with the highest altitude, and as soon as the computers had a solid targeting lock, the laser fired. An incredibly dazzling white-blue shaft of light appeared, struck the warhead and stayed locked on even when the warhead separated from the main rocket body; by the time this happened the missile was moving at almost 1.3 kilometers per second. Twelve seconds after the sensors had first detected the missile launches, the first of the warheads was completely eradicated, and then the station adjusted slightly and fired at the next warhead. This sequence repeated once more, with the same results as the first two times, and with the same deadly efficiency that would come to characterize the Michael Collins space station as one of the most important strategic defense units in history. The third warhead was moving too quickly for the station to get a target lock, so all units in the probable target area, notified via satellite transmissions, took shelter in nearby basements. The plutonium warhead detonated two point one kilometers above the western side of the island, irradiating approximately 95 of the invading hordes of Chinese, dousing them with over three hundred twenty curies of alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Within the next week, ninety percent of the soldiers exposed to the radiation were barely able to breathe without the aid of a respirator, and by the week after that, they were dead. The rest would be put in POW camps in the Philippines until they could be safely transported to camps in the Indian sub-continent, and from there they would go to former Soviet Gulag facilities in the Ukraine.

San Francisco, California, the United States

1427 GMT (6:27 AM PST), 6 December 2001

The last two days had been relatively quiet, at least when compared with the frenzied activity of the week before, but the people of San Francisco could already see the effects of the war. Thousands of sailors were streaming into naval bases all across the west coast, and with the entire National Guard called up, so tens of thousands of people were moving to rally points throughout the state of California. An area of fifty square miles around each military base was set up as a no-fly zone to commercial air traffic, little there was, and off limits to civilians without 'Classified' or above security clearance, which meant that almost seventy five thousand people had to relocate to other areas. Overall, the new changes in policy were at the least disconcerting, and at worst infuriating to the civilians who saw this as an attack on their rights, even though they had supported the Californian governor when he had proposed the idea three days before. State and local governments were getting thousands of mixed messages from residents, saying that the people wanted someone, not the people themselves mind you, to do something, but not to restrict their personal rights even an iota. This put the entire system into a state of nigh unbreakable gridlock, with policymakers trying to go two directions at once in pleasing the peoples demand for action and sooth the various complaints concerning governmental restrictions on personal freedoms. This also meant that the police were working overtime, trying to keep the tranquility between perplexed MPs of the Fourth Infantry Division and the general citizenry of the state of California.

Of course, with the police and MPs tied up with the various civil problems that arose, that meant the door was wide open for less civilized problems to come in and take root. The domestic and racial terrorist group, Nation of Aztlan, a group of radical Hispanic supremacists decided that this would be a perfect time to set up the beginnings of a revolution in the -rightfully Mexican in their opinion- southwest United States. They had found that the more overt their actions, the less they accomplished in the long and short view of things, and they only worsened their standing in the public image, which in turn made their cause just about anathema to anyone with political aspirations. They had made a plan in the early 1990's to incite riots of the ethnic Hispanics and various illegal migrant workers all along the US-Mexican border, and some of the more active members of their organization had started several riots in Texas, although these were very small in scale and entirely ineffective. They had learned that the best way to achieve their aims was to create mass discontent within the people who would make their job all that much easier by tying up the major authorities, and the military would be attempting to go in two directions at once. In only the past three days, they had caused several disruptions in food and money supply chains all across the state, and had begun the process of pitting many of the Los Angeles gangs into an all-out war. The best part of all of this, at least for them, was that since they had gone through third and fourth parties, absolutely no direct connection could be drawn to their organization, which again would make the job of revolution easier. In San Francisco, the Nation of Aztlan branch there had disrupted medical supply chains, and they had stolen 40 tons of guns and ammunition, which would soon be heading to safe houses all over southern California and the Baja peninsula. They had been as generally uncooperative as possible, at least as far as soothing the tensions between the hopelessly incompetent MPs and the civilian population, and in any other place, they could be a broad-spectrum nuisance.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

1737 GMT (2:37 PM), 6 December 2001

The President of Argentina, just kicked out of office the day before, quite literally in fact, was the seventeenth to leave said post in six months. Frankly, it was a sheer wonder that the country managed to survive the totalitarian autocrat Juan Peron and the immensely hopeless financial state of affairs that he and Eva had left the nation to deal with. Ever since then, the country had fit the lexical definition of a banana republic, with some leaders in office for only six hours, so saying you were the president of Argentina is like boasting about having a title from Henry VIII. As with many of the regime changes in the South American continent, a socialist revolution at 3 PM, a military coup at 5:30 PM, and a new interim government being set up by 9 PM, accompanied this most recent change. Looking at it from an outside perspective, it seemed like an utterly bizarre form of the game musical chairs, although with marginally higher stakes risked in the betting pool. Unfortunately, a pan-Hispania supremacist group, whose stated main goal was to unite all of South and Central America in a single superpower, overthrew the near perpetual 'interim' government. The real purpose of their recent activity, however, was much more sinister in nature, and much more deadly in intent to both life and the quasi-stability in the region. The Pan-Hispania group that replaced the multitude of political groups was merely a political front for the largest drug cartel south of the equator, with more than 15 billion dollars worth of capital available to them at any moment. This would only be the next stage in their quest of globalization, and the next stepping-stone on their path to being the most powerful drug smuggling ring on the planet.

The first thing the new President did was to declare martial law in the country, and to declare the new government essentially neutral to all conflicts that did not directly involve the Argentinean people. His staff then quickly relayed this message to the Argentine commanders all over the world, giving them orders to return to their homeland. The next thing he did was to make a big show of rounding up the criminals and drug lords that had been running the country, and he eliminated some of his more vocal opponents in his own organization. Only hours after the new policies implemented, there also began a propaganda campaign not seen since the days of Joseph Stalin, and this even used many of the Stalin-esque media exploitation vectors. Massive billboard pictorials with his face on them went up all over the nation, and hourly radio 'news reports' of what the great leader was doing for the common Argentine worker broadcasted with much more fanaticism than one should ever have reading the news. The writers who made the fictional news reports were exceptionally good at the art of bullshit, which every politician needs on his side, and even now, which parts are real and which aren't is a hotly debated topic. Along with the fictional news reports, new books for schoolchildren had to be written, all with 'appropriate messages', i.e. they preach that the United States is a nation of imperialist oppressors of the world and similar ultra-nationalist rhetoric. The last thing he did before the day ended was to make sure that the stage was for surreptitious forays into Chile and Brazil, in order to further the goal of destabilizing the unfriendly governments of the surrounding nations and advancing the Pan-Hispania agenda.

Rouen, Haute-Normandie, France

1821 GMT, 6 December 2001

The Dutch Army had just rolled into Rouen, over 200 kilometers from the Belgian border, something that should have strictly impossible by any means of warfare. However, the Dutch had help from the Dark Lord, and the armies were marching with unnatural swiftness towards the Atlantic, mowing down any resistance in their path. Even the elite armor units of the French Army, with their new AMX-40s were no match for the near endless hoards of robe wearing magicians, who shot deadly bursts of light from the tips of their wands. One by one, every city the Dutch passed fell and was soon occupied by a force of magic-wielders and soon after the Army rolled even further to the east. Wave upon wave of French troops fought valiantly to defend their homeland, using everything from their standard issue assault rifles to steak knives, but it was to no avail. Then reports started filtering in that enemy forces had landed in the Bay of Biscay and near Cherbourg, and very soon, the French forces were caught in a pincer move that divided their forces in half. This was by no means a fault on the part of the French military, but rather the fact that this new war was a form a blitzkrieg never before seen, a war fought against an enemy who could defend against even the most powerful weapons the world can offer. By the end of the day, the entire Channel coast of France was in the hands of the Dark Lord, and most of the eastern coast was going to fall the following day if things continued in their current vein.


	15. Domine Patri

A/N: I would like to warn my readers that the last section of this chapter is a Lemon, or it might be a Lime, I cannot really tell the difference my self. In addition, this is the first sexual scene I have ever written so please do be kind and let me know how to improve.

Super-max security Psych ward, Bavarian State Hospital, Munich, Germany

0430 GMT (5:30 AM), 7 December 2001

Ginny Weasely was both a medical marvel and a psychiatrist's worst nightmare, as the staff of the Munich medical detention facility soon found out to their dismay and sheer bewilderment. The preliminary blood-work on prisoner #312-A, Ginny Weasely had just come back and it utterly perplexed the entire staff of psychologists and psychiatrists of the Munich facility. The readouts from the computers indicated that either her neurotransmitter precursor levels were off the charts or nearly non-existent and her hormone were as bizarre as the neurotransmitter levels. The level of L-DOPA, the dopamine precursor, was twenty times what they should have been, which should have either sent her into a permanent coma, or into the grave. The level of 5-hydroxytryptophan –the serotonin precursor- was only 2.14 of the average level of a comparatively hale and hearty adult female, which, once again, should have burned out her brain or killed her, neither of which were the case. If she ever woke from the drug-induced sleep, she would be a fascinating case study on the effects of extremely high and exceptionally low levels of neurotransmitters, a discipline that was severely lacking in original research. However, the most incomprehensible and disconcerting part of the information, was the level of adrenaline in her blood; a full sixty times the maximum amount ever found in any human, and yet her adrenal glands and heart tissues were perfectly fine according the MRI readouts. That much stimulant should have caused immediate heart failure, and yet her heart was, from all available data, completely normal and healthy, a medical impossibility that made cardiologists drool when they contemplated examining her heart, either living or dead. The resident neurologists were as mystified as all the other physicians were, as everything they had ever encountered in their field said that this woman should by all rights be a vegetable or deceased.

That morning she awakened from her induced slumber, with a deranged smile on her face, which chilled the very bones of the armed police and physicians watching her, although virtually as soon as they saw it, it had disappeared, making them question if it had really been there. She ate her breakfast very serenely, and she showed no signs of the insanity, which had caused the doctors to sedate her in the first place, which made them, question all of their previous diagnosis of her mental condition. Some of the psych staff was convinced that she was merely playing a part, the calm collected girl who had no business being in the maximum-security wing of a mental hospital, which would reinforce their diagnosis of her having an anti-social personality disorder. Others, who had recently been briefed on the advancement of the magic-users in 'organic and inorganic pseudo-chemistry', as it was called in the meetings, were sure that she was an unfortunate victim of circumstances, and posed no danger to the community. However ninety percent had no idea what to believe, and this was only further complicated when the psychologist assigned to her, Doctor Helga Brauenbaum, began a preliminary psychoanalysis. All the questions asked of the red head met with pleasant smiles and a calm voice, something that completely threw all those watching through the one-way mirror for a loop. When the doctor was interviewed later, she said that the girl showed no signs of any of the maladies that had been diagnosed when she was first brought in, and she thought that she was a very pleasant girl. The mystery that was Ginny Weasely further explored would prove exciting and at times nightmarish, but so far, they had no idea what went through that head under all that fiery red hair. Lucky them.

Ankara, Turkey

0619 GMT (8:19 AM), 7 December 2001

The smallpox epidemic had burned through the city extremely quickly, and its original purpose of leaving massive casualties and burning itself out in less than a week had been fulfilled, leaving 954,321 dead and 149,738 dieing in its wake. The rate of new cases had dropped as quickly as it had risen, but the amount of devastation was far beyond any epidemic the world had seen in the past century. The city's population decreased by almost 30 in six days, and within the next three it would drop another six percent, figures that would scare the hell out of any demographer. But with the end of the infection in Ankara, came an unwelcome faction, that of the socialist rebels, a movement that had inflamed the passions of the people with promises of more security, money and the continued magnanimity of the Republic of Turkey. Of course, like most revolutionaries, they might have said they were going to change things for the better, but when they found themselves actually succeeding in their quest to overthrow the government, the couldn't figure out how to do what they had promised. The people in Ankara had seen first hand how impotent the government and health care systems were when faced with a sudden crisis, and they were terrified at the possibility that the current government might remain in its state of paralysis when something even more serious came up. These fears compounded by rumors that the main governmental body had already left the country abandoning the people to their deaths at the proverbial hand of a silent killer, made the next sequence of action all that much easier.

The Black Sea Socialist Coalition had been a legitimate political organization since the early thirties, when the Mensheviks, ostracized by the general government of the Soviet Union, immigrated to the nations closest to the Soviet border. This was in the hope that should the people ever overthrow the autocratic Stalin and his merry band of followers, they could return to their homeland and seize control from the hypocritical Bolsheviks, and put Russia set to rights again. However as we all well know, this never happened, and by 1942, the BSSC had changed their focus to bringing Menshevik style socialism to the countries they now lived in. However, like what happened with the Marxist theory of socialism, the countries the Mensheviks had emigrated to were even less suited to socialism than Czarist Russia was, and the style of Menshevism changed. Ever since it is founding in 1932, the BSSC had had very few successes in campaigning for legislative positions or national leadership, mainly because most people equated Menshevik democratic socialism with Bolshevik autocratic communism, which is equivalent to saying hydrogen and plutonium are the same thing. However, in the early nineties, a new generation of socialist began to direct the BSSC with new more belligerent principles: the disgraced members of the German Democratic Republic and the other nations of the Soviet bloc, who had been thrown out by their own compatriots. With these new leaders, came new ideals, which were decidedly more 'grassroots' in both style and personality, the kind that would stir up a revolution at the worst possible time, with no regard for the consequences, excepting those that would bite the new leaders in the ass.

The people of Turkey had been unhappy even before the virus had hit and the various terrorist attacks had devastated the countryside, but all the misfortunes that had fallen in Turkey fanned the spark of unrest into an uncontrolled fire of open rebellion. Every day since the virus had been unleashed had seen the ire in the people's hearts blaze brighter as the government did nothing, gripped in the comprehensive horror brought on by confronting a situation never considered, not even in the most petrifying nightmares. Now the time was ripe for a strong leader to appear and promise prosperity, peace and above all else, a return to normalcy; the BSSC stepped up to the plate and knocked the ball right out of the park… and off the planet. A young man of Syrian origin, Abdul Shiraz, led the main rebel force against the barely functioning police forces in the capital city. The older socialists, who had seen the futility of this kind of revolution and knew the general destruction that it would invariably cause, attempted many times in the past few days to pacify the people, as a 1918 Leninist style revolution would benefit no one, but to no avail. The rage of the people was akin to one of the great oil fires started by the retreating Soviets in the Trans-Caucasian oil fields in 1942: relentless, completely uncontrolled and seemingly endless in its depth and magnitude. The socialists were telling the people everything that they wanted to hear, and they promised that it could all be possible for their silence and the unstated demand of their unspoken consent, two things that are easy to give, but near impossible to revoke. Within four hours of the revolution reaching Ankara, the general government was over thrown and the leaders executed for exploiting the peasantry and workers of Turkey. The children of the Turkish people would inherit the social, military, economic, and ecological consequences of a communist revolution, all of which would be unmistakable for decades to come.

Bristol, England, the United Kingdom

0922 GMT, 7 December 2001

What follows is an excerpt from an after-action report given by an officer of the 124th Armored Battalion, describing a battle in Bristol. This is included for their historical significance, as this was the first time in which the Dark Lord himself went up against the British Army, and this impressed the seriousness of the fight on the soldiers of the British Army. This also demonstrated the difficulties in non-magical versus magical combat, and made a very big impression on weapon makers.

"… We had just rolled into the suburbs of Bristol around 9:20 AM on our first sweep of the area of the city and surrounding countryside, when Lieutenant Goldman's tank erupted in flames. I radioed for reinforcements, and I received a message saying that it would be about ten minutes before the nearest combat unit could get to us. The tank to our left, commanded by Sergeant Fuller, radioed that they saw a force of approximately 200 persons clothed in what looked to be black cloaks, which matched the basic description of the enemy we were supposed to be on the lookout for. We traversed our turrets towards the enemy, who by then had begun to spread out quite quickly. One in the group we immediately thought to be the leader, as all those around him seemed to be in a half-bow of sorts, so I ordered my tank to make for him and told the gunner to keep a bead on him. When we got within 100 meters the gunner fired an APERSDU round straight at the supposed leader; the round hit dead on, and took out most everyone within five meters of the target. When the smoke cleared, the leader was still standing and it looked like he did not even flinch at the 120mm depleted uranium shell that should have been able to take a full infantry platoon at 200 meters. I ordered the gunner to reload with a HE round, and the driver put the tank into a slow reverse to maintain distance between them and us. As soon as the gun had been readied, our Challenger rocked back and forth from the gun recoil, and less than a tenth of a second later the shell hit the six-foot tall leader straight in the chest. The force in that explosive round should have been able to blast a three-foot deep hole into solid concrete, yet when the smoke cleared, he was still standing as if nothing had happened.

"As soon as I recovered from my shock at seeing this, I screamed into the radio to begin a full retreat, and then I called on the division net for an air strike to carpet-bomb the whole area. My requests were of course denied, and by then, almost half of my platoon was put out of commission by the magic-users, whose magic sliced through the Chobham armor of our faithful Challengers like a hot knife through butter. Sgt. Fuller's tank was on my immediate left, and he stuck to me as if he was attached with superglue, so when I got out of there, he was right behind me. Just as we cleared the wreckage of Goldman's tank, a bright flash of light hit Fuller's fuel tank dead on, and it looked like Bonfire night as a small volcano erupted out from his fuel stores immolating the interior of the tank. After only a few seconds, the ammunition blew sky high, and my tank was hit with a ricocheting piece of a HEAT round, which melted through the tread guards on the rear right side of the chassis and damaged the ventilation systems. We called division and told them that they had bloody well better put a full strike force on the job of clearing Bristol if they wanted to take the city with negligible losses. When all the damage was tallied up, we had lost eight out of nine tanks, 24 dead, 3 wounded, and five missing, which amounted to a loss rate of ninety-odd percent."

Colonel Jason Tavington was commanding the only tank to escape the ambush that lay at the Bristol outskirts, and the strike force he requested arrived the next day. The full might of the 26th Mechanized Infantry Battalion swept into Bristol like a hurricane into a sleepy harbor, and in its wake, there was a swath of scorched earth where once stood homes, businesses and factories. Bristol turned out to be one of the most costly offensives of the British campaign, with more than 5500 men lost in the battle for the downtown area alone. More than 1200 soldiers are still unaccounted for, and presumed to have died in POW camps in Ireland, although there have been several reports of partisan resistance groups lead by these persons.

Pusan, Republic of Korea

1640 GMT, 7 December 2001 (1:40 PM, 8 December 2001)

The DPRK had pushed the South Korean and American forces back to a small line of defense around the city of Pusan, recreating the Pusan perimeter from the early segments of the Korean War. From here, the ROK would fight for every inch of land as if their very lives depended on the owner of the land they stood on, which in all probability was the truth. The sheer force with which the KPA struck the American and South Korean forces holding the 38th parallel was staggering, especially when one considered that, the North Koreans had launched two major offensives in less than a week. They smashed through the demilitarized zone like a sledgehammer through wet tissue paper, and not even the near constant air strikes from various Southern airbases could serve as even a marginal deterrent. Most of the heavy field pieces in the southern armadas were captured when their operators just left them to keep up with the quickly retreating frontlines, and according to records, most were in working order. These towed field pieces were on average thirty-five years old, and some had even seen the first Korean War, but whether old or new, they would soon be firing upon their former masters. Even as the noose tightened around the city of Pusan, a massive evacuation of the city was taking place, and with the waterways clogged with all sorts of crafts, it looked like an Oriental Operation Dynamo and evacuation of Dunkirk. For as far as the eye could see, ferries meant for cars loaded with halftracks and APCs clogged the waterways, and more than 2200 privately owned boats from Japan were taking care of the infantry, loading from the docks and anywhere the boats could pull up. The evacuation took place in the dead of night for a very specific reason: the chances of accurate artillery fire lessened considerably, and on civilian transports with little to no armor, the martial forces needed every advantage they could get.

With the evacuation came a bit of 'good' news: the DPRK had issued a statement saying that their military forces would advance no further, if and only if the nations of the Coalition acknowledged that the North was the one, true Korea. However, the consequences implicit with agreeing to this demand were entirely unacceptable to the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. They had spent billions of their respective currencies on protecting the South from the communist hoards, and sending up the white flag here would open them up to years of criticism for being a fair-weather friend, the worst kind of ally. Just having the label of a fair-weather ally could cripple nation's military endeavors for years, if not decades to come, and in this new war, a collaborator could be worth their weight in platinum. Within minutes of the ultimatum, the Embassy in Pyongyang received the last incoming transmission from USSATCOM that they would ever get in that location: Reject all auth. of NK gov't; Recall to US ASAP, via Japan, elim all Con and above docs. With that, the US said the gloves were off, and they were off for good, and the United States had committed themselves for the long haul in the Far East Asian sector. Japan, the UK and many other Coalition nations sent similar messages to their respective Embassies, and within the hour huge towers of smoke came from the furnaces deep in the belly of the Embassies as all documents rated Confidential and above were burned, along with computer hard drives and all CDs containing information. When the Korean State Security Services noticed the columns of smoke, it was only a matter of time before the Embassies became occupied in the name of the security of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

Southern California Coast, the United States

2118 GMT (1:18 PM PST), 7 December 2001

Hurricane Priscilla had decided that she needed to visit the south California coast, much to the dismay of the Navy, Coast Guard and local police forces, whose jobs, problematical as they were, intensified by Mother Nature. The small hurricane had been a category one storm only a few days ago and had even dropped into the tropical storm class for about nine hours, making most meteorologists believe that it would dissipate before it ever made landfall. However about 150 miles offshore from Los Angeles, a huge field of very warm seawater had popped up directly in Priscilla's path. The water field caused the storm to intensify rapidly to Category Five in barely sixteen hours, the minimum pressure was a new world record at 867 millibars, and sustained wind speeds set an additional world record at 244 miles per hour (392.68 KPH). Terminal Island was completely submerged by the waves kicked up by the storm, and the buildings that once lay on the island became nothing more than thousands upon thousand of pieces of driftwood and debris, most never to be seen again. The storm surge from Priscilla reached a maximum of 28 feet high, and it penetrated more than a mile inland, straight into downtown LA flooding the streets and overwhelming the storm sewers with more than 300000 gallons of harbor water. Most of the businesses within range of the storm surge shattered into thousands of pieces of driftwood and broken metal, making recovery a nightmare of epic proportions and the economy would feel the effects for years. The storm surge was most definitely the worst part of the cyclone, for it beached several ships over 150 meters from their moorings in San Pedro, although a couple were found almost 300 meters inland.

Some of the ships found farther inland were military warships and a few oil tankers that had not finished unloading the crude from their holds before the Port Authority shut the harbor down in preparation for the storm. The Crown Royal, an Israeli-owned vessel just in from Qatar struck a large decorative statue which pierced its double pressure hull and sent its viscous ebony cargo oozing onto the city streets, clogging the nearby storm drains and slicking the pavement. As the surge passed, almost 30000 barrels of oil went along with it, contaminating the financial district and almost everything in the area between the coast and Yucca and Vine. The second oil tanker that spilled its glutinous payload onto the avenues and boulevards of Los Angeles was a Pakistani owned tanker, nearly 40 years old and just about falling apart at every seam. The hull had so many patches that not even the crew what the original paint color had been, but now it was deep uniform rusty red, a tribute to the long voyages over the seven seas the Pride of Islamabad had seen. The Islamabad was the only civilian ship to come to rest actually in the City of Angels, but it was by far the most costly of any beaching caused by Priscilla, namely due to what brought it to a sharp and sudden stop. The 35000-ton ship slammed straight into a high-rise apartment complex, toppling the massive structure and the people inside had no choice to come along for the ride into freezing cold water and several tons of rubble from what used to be their shelter.

Several military warships also washed up out of the harbor, and this came only when forces around the world needed them the most in places thousands of miles away and in a very short amount of time. The Ticonderoga class cruiser USS Saigon washed up in Harbor City, ramming into a large and extremely sturdy crane used to load and unload forty-foot long containers on super-large cargo ships, completely demolishing the bow and severely damaging the bridge and conning tower. Debris from the Saigon flowed into the city, creating a huge security breach where anybody and his brother could pick highly classified military equipment off the streets, and considering how many gangs there are in the city they scared the hell out of many police district chiefs. The SPY-1C phased radar array broke off the hull in one solid piece, and ended up on the sixth story of a parking garage, although exactly how it ended up twenty-five feet above the crests of the largest waves still baffles investigators as it violates most laws of physics. A Los Angeles class nuclear submarine, the USS Dallas, smashed up against the side of its dock, crushing the spherical bow sonar array and nearly decapitating the sub, vis-à-vis the conning tower almost totally sheared off from the main body of the sub. By the time the storm was over, the Dallas looked like a gigantic crumpled beer can in its sub pen, and the HY80 steel had splintered in more than a dozen critical areas, including the torpedo room, the main control center and the reactor compartment. When the reactor shielding shattered, more than one thousand gallons of highly radioactive water drained into the floodwaters, exposing most of San Pedro Harbor and the surrounding ocean to nearly 200 curies of radiation. In the coming years, the fishing industry around LA would decline sharply, and sea-life in the area would die off in droves, but some of the more resilient species would mutate into much stronger forms, such as a local species of shark, which became 20 larger and more aggressive.

The last ship we are going to visit is the J. Robert Oppenheimer, an America class battle cruiser, which was a true testament to the power of Hurricane Priscilla and the massive waves that slammed the southern California coast. The Oppenheimer was in dry-dock when the storm surge lifted it straight off of the scaffolds and sent careening through the naval base, eventually coming to rest on what used to be one of the base administration offices. The main superstructure struck one of the many super-heavy-duty loading cranes that dotted the area of the docks and harbor, and crushed the entire bridge into a wreck of twisted metal. Before the Oppenheimer came to rest, the ship rolled over twice, allowing one of the three colossal gun turrets to take leave of the ship, and the turret wound up near Hollywood Blvd. and Vine Ave. Most of the equipment on the main deck was lost when the ship went into the first roll, and during the second roll, debris from the wrecks of nearby buildings battered the exterior of the ship, ripping the more sturdy equipment straight off the hull leaving jagged gaping holes. The landed on its port side, looking like a toy someone had taken a crowbar to, the propeller blades bent in towards the shafts, and wearing more dents than a new car after a major hailstorm. The eighteen-inch thick hull had been punctured dozens of times by high strength steel I-beams, which had struck the ship at more than 140 MPH, making them little more than 2000-pound torpedoes on a straight trajectory and a target the size of a city block. When the damage inspectors evaluated the damage done to the three military vessels, they reported that the Navy shipyards could repair the Saigon and the Oppenheimer, but the Dallas was a complete loss and would have to go to the scrap yards.

As the storm passed over the city, rain came in torrents, filling the streets, saturating the ground and mixing with pure oil, creating a grotesque noxious muck that clung to anything that it came into contact with, making clean-up efforts a living hell. Quite a bit of the crude drained slowly into the ocean, creating an oil slick twice the size of the Exxon Valdez spill, and eventually the oil contaminated over three hundred forty miles of beaches and coastal land, shutting down one of California's most popular tourist attractions. The Los Angeles city area had received more precipitation in three days then it usually received in a span of two and a half years, which caused immense flooding in the area of the Yucca Corridor and Hollywood Hills, nearly ruining several movie studios. The downtown area looked as if an 8.3 earthquake had struck; some of the skyscrapers and high-rise hotels no longer had their top stories, only the jagged remnants of their former glory, standing as testimony to the power of the storm. Most of the city was knee deep in a gelatinous muck made from water, vast amounts of soil, various petrochemicals and about four dozen carcinogenic substances released from the industrial district when some storage tanks burst after hit by flying wooden joists. This odiferous slime would take nearly two years to completely remove from the city; mostly because once the damn stuff dried, it became harder than cement, although it unfortunately did not lose its nauseating stench. The death toll from hurricane related damage came to approximately fifteen thousand dead, eleven thousand missing, and three hundred thousand left homeless in the Los Angeles area alone, and almost 33.8 billion US$ in damages.

A small hotel in the suburbs of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the United Kingdom

Circa 2230 GMT, 7 December 2001

Gabrielle Delacour was almost floating on air because of one simple undeniable fact: she had found her soul mate alive and well. From the moment she had come within twenty feet of him, it had felt like she had found joy and contentment made tangible, and they wrapped themselves endlessly around her heart and whispered reassurances to her. When she met with Harry, the first thing she did was to devour his lips in a fiery kiss, and as soon as their lips met, she was lost in a sea of passion, the depths of which have never been fully probed by man or woman. Very soon, they had to release each other to take breath, but loosing the feeling of his slightly chapped lips on hers was almost too much to bear, but she consoled herself with the knowledge that soon they would be as close as one can be to another person. They quickly moved to the room assigned to them by the hotel staff, and there they began a sacrament as old as time itself, and as miraculous as any other force of this universe. As soon as they arrived at the room, they met again in a soul-searing kiss, which stoked the flames of their arousal into an inferno of unimaginable size and intensity.

Gabby slowly stripped herself for her fiancé, starting first with her outer jacket that before had protected her from the cold English night, and even the act of slipping the heavy coat off her shoulders was an aphrodisiac to Harry's senses. Harry sat semi-calmly on the bed watch the erotic display his future wife was giving him, and although he already knew what the layers of cotton and silk hid from others prying eyes, each time he looked upon her body if was as the first time, always discovering something new and tantalizing. Every soft curve revealed to him he looked upon with pure love, desire and utter devotion, but every square millimeter of velvety, perfect skin fed an animalistic yearning in him, one that could never truly be denied, only appeased for amounts of time. As she slowly removed her satin blouse, she mesmerized him with the sight of her perfectly formed 38DD breasts and the four-centimeter wide areolas, already pebbled in sweet seductive desire, barely restrained as they were by her lacy scarlet brassiere, which only inspired him to new heights of sexual desire. When she finally removed her cotton panties, he was almost ready to go off like a volley of rockets, but by sheer force of will alone, he staved off completion until he was sure they would both find it meaningful. He quickly joined her in the freedom of nudity, and he slid down her body, moving toward her Venus mound and the glistening lips there, just begging with the entirety of their being to be kissed. He gently kissed the trimmed landing strip of pale blond curls, and then he set to work, tonguing her outer labia while searching for the one spot that would make squeal in delight and sheer pleasure. He found her clitoris and gave it the third degree with both his lips and tongue, and very soon, she gave a breathy moan as her orgasm rolled over her with all the intensity of an avalanche.

They then preceded to the higher forms of sexual arts, which they have refused to divulge to this author, much to his great disappointment, and I am sure to yours as well.


	16. Who Dares Wins

The Republic of China, Taiwan, the South China Seas

0317 GMT (11:17 AM Local), 10 December 2001

The last three days had been the best so far for the Coalition forces in the area, just rolling back through the territory they had been force to give up and most were on medical detail transporting the surviving Chinese troops to Tsoying, where military physicians treated them for heavy radiation poisoning. The ROC was back in control of their island and they were proclaiming it loudly for the entire world to hear, that they had defeated their long-time adversary with the help of cherished allies. However, now they had a new problem to focus on, one much more dangerous than even the Chinese hoards from across the narrow channel: the repercussions from the magical world, heavily hit by the neutron weapons, and what forces they could muster up. Early reports showed an enormous grouping of bomber-sized radar contacts taking off from sites all around coastal China, with imagery from the _Collins_ space station and some heavily modified U-2Rs from Diego Garcia confirming the data and giving an approximate number of 420 contacts. Thirty minutes after SPY-1c, 1d, and 3a radar sets from the various navies in the area first picked them up, the targets entered the FAADEZ, the Forward Area Air Defense Engagement Zone and then the real party got started. Taiwanese F-16C/D air defense fighters scrambled from bases all over the island, and American F-14As, Cs, and Ds, joined them, and all of them carried the most technologically advanced air-to-air missiles the United States had to offer. The first unit to meet up with the bandits was VF-321; the Wild Bunch, a group of F-14D Tomcats launched from the _USS Nimitz_ flying Combat Air Patrol seventy miles from the Chinese coast and nearly one hundred thirty miles north of Taiwan, and as soon as they saw the opposition, some of the veteran combat pilots nearly wet their pants in abject fear.

Over four hundred dragons, Chinese Fireballs as a magical creature expert later confirmed, were on a definite warpath, but the baffling thing was this was completely unprovoked by either the Chinese or the Coalition forces in the area. So far, the command echelon had been very careful not to provoke any of the sentient or semi-sentient creatures much larger than themselves without good cause, as that could be very, very bad for their health, and would most likely make their life insurance premiums skyrocket. The Squadron leader of VF-321 quickly called out HOOK RIGHT and the six Tomcats went into full afterburner screaming towards the main bulk of the airborne forces, all the while relaying requests for more forces. Very quickly, they had left the 400+ two-story tall flying reptiles far behind them, met up with some freshly launched F-15H Eagles from a ROC airbase, and began to head back to the contact point, their confidence bolstered by the new wing-mates. The Tomcats locked on first with their AIM-54E Phoenix II and BIM-154 Anaconda ALRAAM (Advanced Long Range Air to Air Missiles), and launched from more than fifty miles away. The missiles dropped into the slipstream and the solid-fuel engines lit, propelling the missiles to speeds upward of Mach 3.2, and as soon as the independent seeker heads in the missiles activated, the flights readied their next shots. The missiles moved at over 2200 mph towards the dragons, but trying to shoot down a target flying toward you at appreciable rate of speed with a nose-to-nose shot is almost impossible even against non-moving targets. Most of the missiles missed their targets, some because the targets dodged them at the last moment, others because they tried to engage too many of the dragons at once, missing many by more than 40 meters. The few missiles that made it within detonation distance of the dragons had little effect on the 12-ton Godzilla wannabes, the glowing fragments of steel ricocheted off their thick hides, although some fragments lodged in the soft fleshy parts of the exterior, i.e. eyes, inside the mouth, etc.

When the dragons came within 35 miles, the Eagles opened up with AIM-120 Scorpion AMRAAM missiles flying off the rails and swiftly closing with the massive herpetological aerial threat. The AMRAAM shots had better luck because the of a software upgrade to make high maneuverability targets easier to hit and therefore much easier to disable or otherwise neutralize, and their slightly larger warheads did not hurt any. Several of the missiles struck dead on into the faces of the reptilians, causing the others to scatter over several kilometers and hundreds of meters of altitude, making the next missile volleys much less successful. By that time, the Taiwanese Kang Ting class frigates _Hsi Ning_ and _Kun Ming_, numbers 1203 and 1205 correspondingly, had locked onto the closest section with their Sea Chaparral missiles, and the American _Ticonderoga_ class cruiser _USS_ _Cowpens_ had done the same with its SM-3ER missiles and phased radar array. When confirmation of the go-ahead order received from Vice Admiral Porter's administrative center in Manila, a massive volley of fire was unleashed from the ships, springing into the sky slowly but quickly accelerating deadly payloads into the sky. While the two frigates could only fire four missiles respectively, the _Cowpens_ could fire one hundred and twenty-two SM-3ER missiles, which it did with deadly speed, exactitude, and perspicacity. The Standard Missiles fired by the cruiser were slower than their air-launched cousins were, but with the slower speed came greater accuracy, greater range, and a hit to kill kinetic energy warhead, which, needless to say, meant much more bang for your buck. The missiles only made it to Mach 2.1 during the cruise, but during the last leg of the flight, they accelerated to over 6000 miles per hour, and when they hit the effects were both instantaneous and awe-inspiring due to the effectiveness of the defensive shots and the power of man over nature. The hailstorm of missiles nearly decapitated a third of the incoming fleet and the shoot through fragments destroyed many more of the dragon's ability to stay aloft, causing them to plunge several thousand feet into the cool waters below at more than 180 miles per hour. At 180 mph, hitting water is almost as bad as hitting solid concrete, because when water is struck suddenly, it will naturally resist any further movement, making the normally fluid substance momentarily into something as hard as a foot of granite. Regardless of the inch-and-a-half-thick scaled armor plating their enormous hides strong as wrought iron, the force of 12 tons hitting the water at around 180 mph nearly blew the dragons apart like a rotten tomato striking the floor, staining the sea with green blood and the remains of the fire-gizzards.

Even with the massive amounts of anti-air fire, almost half of the dragons made it through the defensive screen surrounding the island, causing the air raid and rocket attack sirens to sound in an attempt to warn the remaining civilians of the impending attack. The dragons swept in fast and low, torching anything and everything that looked even remotely flammable, and they had a great time chasing the two leggers around trying to stop their handiwork. Left over T-80s from the invaders set alight and left to explode, their ammunition cooking off and flying in every possible direction with no possibility of stopping it, caused near catastrophic damage to the infrastructure of the JTF (Joint Task Force). What remained of the civil infrastructure was completely demolished in the firestorms that followed the attack, and more than 8000 Taiwanese died because even the basic social services were off-line, and many thousands more died in the aftermath. Firehouses, police stations, hospitals, schools, libraries, museums, all targeted and attacked indiscriminately with a single result in every case: the complete and utter destruction of the structure in question. The 5000+ degree Kelvin fires immolated dozens of military vehicles, and one by one the fuel tanks exploded, the ammunition cooked off and the metal plating converted into a molten slag, glowing red, yellow and white with heat. Several gasoline tankers, waiting to have their volatile wares pumped out of their steel bellies, caught by the flames and ruptured from flying shrapnel, and they exploded with the force of 25 tons of TNT each, spreading flaming bits of metal over 3 square kilometers, adding to the firestorms in progress. When the dragons touched down, the infantry surrounded them, firing away with assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades, recoilless rifles, auto-cannons, tank cannons, AA artillery, and anything else that could fire and hit from a distance. After fifteen minutes of fighting, the ground forces received assistance from the navy air forces, who had been refueling and rearming aboard the _Nimitz_, and were now set in a mix of anti-air and anti-ground weaponry.

The A-6 Intruders swept into the area in a tight V-formation and when the leader called out tally ho on the bandits, the squadron of eight split into four groups of two and went off to engage individual targets. The first group took out two dragons just from lucky shots to the head, but before they could move on to the third, a tower of flames 20 meters wide engulfed the pair, causing the JP-8 in their tanks to self-detonate, which blew them to steaming bits. The second flight had much better hunting than the first and when they returned to the carrier, their kill tally came to four dragons' dead plus two wounded by secondary explosions from the gas tankers they had bombed. The third survived by the skin of their teeth when a couple of Stingers locked onto them and not the thirty foot tall dragon that it had been pointed towards, so it took some pretty fancy and slick maneuvers as well as a couple of flares to avoid the missiles. The fourth and final pair had the best tally of all those concerned, with nine downed and three more severely wounded by the secondary explosions caused by the many flammable substances inside the dragons. When the AGM-65A Maverick had buried itself in the dragons' midsection, the warhead ended up only a few inches away from the enormous gizzard where the many combustible chemicals that create the marvelous fire breath are held, consequently when the high explosive detonated, so did the rest of the dragon. The next three waves of fighter-bombers forced the dragons to retreat, but this victory was obtained through heavy losses of lives both in the air and on the ground, an estimated 3400 military personnel dead and more than 2000 wounded and/or missing. On their way back to the mainland, the Fireballs set fire to the upper decks of any of the naval warships that they passed over, which meant they caught both the _Cowpens_ and the _Nimitz_, nearly capsizing both of the ships. The Nimitz was out of commission for several months undergoing repairs to the partially melted flight deck, and the ammunition storage areas, damaged in a secondary explosion caused by burning jet fuel, but thankfully not ignited themselves. The Cowpens, however, was in dry dock for nearly fourteen months while hundreds of ship-builders worked day and night to restore the gutted ship to its former glory and its wartime readiness, although the repairs cost over two-thirds of what it did to actually build the damn thing.

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan

0944 GMT (3:44 PM Local), 10 December 2001

The Russian Space Shuttles Buran and Ptichka were being hastily prepared to carry the last pieces of a Russian strategic defense satellite constellation into the Molniya orbit so that it could protect Mother Russia. Unlike the prosperous Americans who could afford to run two dozen or more separate space projects at once and not even worry if most of them failed, the Russian Federal Space Agency was held to much higher standards by both the military and the main governmental body. If there were a failure here, the person or persons 'found' to be the most responsible would disappear into the night, into the modern version of the Black Maria's, just as so many innocents had during the Purges and the Great Terror during the 1930's. In some ways, the new government was much worse than the Stalinist regime of the 1920's to the 1950's, and with the ex-KGB lackey Putin and his greed in office, there was no doubt exactly who was in control of the internal policy. Ever since the sudden privatization of the Russian held companies, the individual corporation heads had been paying millions of rubles to any promising _zhopa_ who had any modicum of influence and political promise, all the while whispering in their ear the actions they should take to keep the cash flowing. However, they did not give a single kopeck to alleviate the economic black hole that had formed in the wake of the collapse of a state command economy, nor did it seem they would do so any time soon. It had taken years for the Ministry of Defense to secretly divert enough funds from various civil projects to make the required launches, and even more to convince the Ministry of Commerce not to destroy the only space shuttles the nation possessed. Now with the American laser defense system online, the Russian Federation could wait no longer, for, by their reasoning, it would be only a matter of time before some nuclear capable country decided to lash out at Russia. The arms race had started up again, and even between allies, this would definitely cause more than a little strife, because although the Russian Bear had gotten a new owner, it was still a wild animal with baser instincts as the primary commands and very sharp claws.

The launch of Buran went off without a hitch, except for some fluctuations in the fuel flow manifold and the gimbaled pressure system that nearly sent to shuttle into a high-G spin and a quick trip back to ground going tail first. The Ptichka however, suffered a much more tragic fate; Chechen extremist rebels, discontented with the new pro-Moscow regime installed in Groznyy, decided that a fitting way to get a point across would be to 'interfere' with a major military operation or undertaking, luckily they were not stupid enough to make an attack on a military base, as they had been on Condition Red for the past twelve days. They had paid some of the Kazakh guards nearly 1500 rubles each, which when converted into Tenge was more than half a years pay for him, and they let them onto the base while looking the other way at the long packages and assorted weapons they were carrying. The rebels hid in a copse of trees near the second launching platform where the Ptichka awaited the go-ahead, and quickly took out the stolen weaponry they had brought along so they could assemble the launcher. The guns they had with them were several assault rifles of the infamous Mikhail Kalashnikov line, more specifically ten AK-74s, 12 AK-47Ms, 2 RPK-74s and 4 silenced 7.62mm Dragunov sniper rifles to silence any would-be heroes that might end the mission before the fat lady sang. The other weapons the group of twenty carried with them were an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher, three Carl Gustav M2s, ten RPO-As with thermobaric warheads, five dozen grenades of assorted types, one NVS 12.7 mm heavy machine gun, and eight modified 9K310 Igla-1s man-portable anti-air missiles, formidable weapons all and every one loaded with live ammunition. The had come knowing that as soon as they fired their weapons, the full clout of the armored battalion stationed here would be brought down upon them like the angry hand of God, and they would probably not live to see the next sunrise. With twenty in their group, every sweep of a searchlight made the Chechens go prone, and each time they thanked God the distracted base interior guards did not pay more attention to their duties.

As Ptichka's main engines revved up, the band of Chechens readied the Igla-1s and locked onto the large fuel tank that held dozens of cubic meters of pressurized liquefied hydrogen, the area where the shuttle would be most vulnerable to any incoming fire. A single puncture by any hot shrapnel would blow parts of the shuttle as far away as Hawaii and Glasgow in Scotland, and such a strike would virtually destroy the Baikonur facility's ability to function in any form of spaceport. Two things happened simultaneously: the Ptichka's main rocket engines ignited and the trigger on an Igla, depressed by a trigger-happy terrorist, shot the missile out of the aluminum tube and soon it was racing toward the shuttle and the highly flammable fuel tank attached to the aforementioned spacecraft. Less than a second later the other rebels fired the other missiles, and in just over four seconds after the first missile launched, it struck the massive Energia-like booster on the left, causing an O-ring to slip slightly out of place. The other missiles struck the hull in many places, but only one struck the intended target, and while it did not directly rupture the fuel tank, several of the welded rivet heads that held the massive sheets of metal flush with each other popped off and allowed the sheets to come loose. The liquid hydrogen in the tank was stored at over 7000 PSI, as such even a hole only one millimeter in diameter would soon blossom into a major breach, and these holes were approximately 1.5 centimeters in diameters. A torrent of the flammable gas rushed out through the 30-odd holes, quickly igniting from the heat of the booster rockets, knocking the Ptichka nearly 20 degrees off the intended course, and nearly destroying the right booster. By the time the rest of the fuel ignited, the Ptichka was already over 4 kilometers from the launch pad, so the effects on the Cosmodrome were not as bad as they could have been, but almost two-thirds of the base was flattened by a 3000 PSI overpressure, enough to make the few remaining missile silos on the base cave in.

As predicted, the remaining base security forces and the armored battalion came down on the rebels like a hammer, rolling in with obsolete BTR-152's and the new BMP-3 Infantry Fighting Vehicles, and at least three platoons of infantry, all armed with the latest in CIS weaponry. The Chechens had been smart, setting up their equipment before they had started shooting, so when the infantry came upon them, they opened up with the full fury of an insurgent infantry unit and a people willing to die for their cause. The NVS ripped the still air with the staccato cracks and bright tracer flashes, chewing into the black beret quality soldiers coming inexorably, relentlessly towards them with more than enough firepower to leave no trace of them but a large grease spot. The two men operating the AGS grenade launcher focused on the BTR half-tracks, shooting holes the size of baseballs into the 12 mm frontal armor, killing every singular person inside the troop carrier and making the vehicle look like Swiss cheese. Once the grenade launcher destroyed the half-dozen or so half-tracks, the AGS gunners turned their attentions to the infantry and quickly began depleting the numbers of enemy forces. The RPO-A operators focused on the BMP-3s, firing the fuel-air explosives straight at the moderately armored, light tanks, but what they had not taken into consideration was that the BMP-3 had much more improved protection than its predecessors did, and thus it was much harder to neutralize. Add to that the fact that the main armament was a 100-mm cannon, the secondary gun was a 30 mm auto cannon, and that it had several 7.92 mm machine guns, and they had decided to perform a fool's errand, one that would most likely get them all killed. A few lucky hits near the exhaust vents on the back of the armored vehicles made three of them explode from the inside out, but most of them survived until the were in firing range with all of their weapons. The thermobaric warheads had much more effect on the infantry that was near the vehicles, simultaneously charring the exterior of their bodies and bursting the interior organs out any available opening from the extreme overpressure.

When the rebels saw the 100 mm cannons atop the IFVs traversing towards them, they decided unanimously that discretion was the better and probably much smarter cousin of valor, thus they scattered in every conceivable direction, including up into the trees. The ones who went into the trees didn't get very far before their bodies had been thoroughly riddled with lead from the Kalashnikov series rifles and machine guns, and several APERS rounds from the IFVs didn't help their situations any either. The copse the insurgents had scattered into was far too dense for the IFVs to navigate, so the crew and men inside dismounted and began the spec-ops maneuvers they had trained for, and from then on all communication would be from hand signals. The remaining men split into six or seven squads of about twelve men each -numbers are not known exactly due to varying reports from the personnel involved- and they began to move almost silently through the dense fir trees. Most of the groups met with total failure, but we do know that two of the squads became engaged in heavy firefights with the remaining Chechens, one of which the rebels completely slaughtered. The second squad came upon the group of Chechens as they were finishing wiping the floor with the comrades of the _spetsnaz_ quality soldiers, and they had even begun to desecrate the bodies, which understandably made the newcomers quite irritated. A small detachment of four men, wearing stolen uniforms, of the now sixteen strong rebel forces headed off in the direction of the main compound with what looked to be some anti-tank missiles and their launchers, and a bag of what looked to be grenades. As soon as they were out of sight the squad of loyal Russian troops wearing the signature, rust red helmets of the Interior Ministry Special units, moved in for the most gratifying kills of their long careers. Even with the advantage of a superior number of weapons, the Chechens were doomed from the very start, as their force had just split and the Russians had the element of surprise, something that could easily tip the scales in any battle. After less than ten minutes of an intense firefight, all but two of the terrorists were either dead or dieing, and the two that weren't were going to the new Gulag system, supposedly 'kinder and gentler' but in actuality it was all the same as it had been in the 1940's.

The final free Chechen soldiers had made their way back to the area where the Russians had parked the BMP-3s, and began setting up their final stand, using the grenades they had brought along, and some tripwire. The quickly made the booby-traps, stringing the tripwire at thigh and ankle heights, so that one could not step over nor could one crawl under the wires with out setting off the grenades. As soon as they finished the explosive welcoming committee, the insurgents moved to the vehicles, carefully placing jerry-rigged time bombs made from what investigators later identified as bedside battery-operated alarm clocks and several anti-armor grenades to all but one of the vehicles. The single IFV they did not attach any explosives to, they staffed, starting the Gazpromez made 500 horsepower diesel engine and checking to make sure that they had ammunition for all the guns on the vehicle. After three minutes, the time bombs detonated, sending white-hot shrapnel into the fuel stores and ammunitions bins of the other IFVs, causing massive explosions, which caused those in the woods to swiftly return to the vehicles. Two of the squads reunited just before attempting to move out of the woods, so when some of their members stepped on the near invisible tripwires, almost three quarters of the entire force downed from serious shrapnel wounds. The rest of the incoming Russian were cut down by the 7.92 mm shells firing from the PKT machine guns mounted on the side of the BMP, and some rounds from the 100 mm gun were fired to prevent identification of the bodies and to wipe out any survivors of the last barrage. The Chechens quickly called out on the R-173 tactical radio for support in destroying these rebels, who they reported to be wearing the uniforms and colors of the Interior Ministry Special units, and then they requested more armor and possibly an air strike. The regional command nixed the air strike, but the several heavy mortar teams pounded the indicated forested area so badly that almost nothing identified during the subsequent investigations held real value, although some evidence of the Chechen fraudulence did survive in the two captured soldiers. After ten minutes of shelling, there was nary a thing living in the affected area, so pockmarked that it looked like the dark side of the moon and hostile to all carbon-based life forms. When the armored vehicle reinforcements arrived, the Chechens relayed a fabricated story about how the terrorists had some how acquired incredibly realistic uniforms that signified them as belonging to one of the MVD Special brigades, which would allow them access to even the most secure areas of the base. When the vehicles made an about face to leave, the rebels from Chechnya, ensconced safely in the armored belly of the appropriated IFV, just followed the convoy of heavily armed troops until they quietly slipped away, stymieing the plans for a long grueling interrogation.

West (Israeli) Jerusalem, Israel

1745 GMT (7:45 PM), 10 December 2001

The Palestinians and Israelis were at it again, fighting over the land they both claimed belonged to their gods 'chosen people', all because of ideological differences brought on by belief in something that is no truer than the Easter bunny or the tooth fairy. Belief in any supreme being only causes the onset of idiocy, such as the belief that any land can truly be claimed for the 'chosen people', or that any deity whose followers espouse the virtues of peace should gladly kill non-believers. It all started because of the attacks on the makeshift medical centers throughout the region, committed by Hamas, Al Qaeda, rogue members of the Palestinian Liberation Front, and a half-dozen other organizations with mostly Muslim membership. This caused many people to paint the entire religion of Islam with a black brush and to just write off the members of said religion as the commonplace nutcases and fundamentalists, incapable of neither seeing reason or following it. This, when coupled with some belligerent statements from the Palestinian National Authority caused many in the Israeli military to take an even more aggressive posture than they had before, and many politicians to irrationally condemn the Palestinians as being part and parcel in the planning and execution of the terrorist events. The Palestinians, however, tried to make the Israeli command see the logic in the argument that the entire culture could not be involved with the planning of major terrorist attacks, and neither would most of them want to be involved. Unfortunately, one can lead a politician to a fully explained and reasonable theory, but one cannot make the few neurons left in his cranium start firing to let him accept the reasonable explanation and what the aforementioned explanation implies. Thus, it was a series of political moves, which caused the outbreak of violence in both the Gaza Strip and West Bank, but it was a series of retaliations, which escalated it from a minor squabble, seen almost daily, into a full-scale war, not seen in this part of the region since the Six-day War of 1973.

The siege of West Jerusalem began with four synchronized suicide bombings, three on crowded marketplaces and the fourth at a school near the geographic centre of the city; all of the attacks occurred near the middle of the day to inflict maximum casualties. When the Associated Press released news of the school massacre, thousands of furious Israelis took to the streets and began to perform summary executions on any suspected sympathizers or 'known threats', which could include anybody that a mob member had a grudge against. Firebombs, sledgehammers, bulldozers, anti-tank weapons and many other implements of destruction ripped apart hundreds of Palestinian homes during one of the worst riots the world has ever seen, and more than 3500 men, women and children lost their lives during the riots. The next day, insurgents from the West Bank attacked several synagogues around the city of Jerusalem and several suicide bombings took hundreds of lives from both sides, but with a majority of Israelis in the casualty statistics. This became the pattern for about three days, with every day bringing new escalations and more casualties, and each day the two sides came ever closer to taking that ultimate irrevocable movement that would change the temperament of the situation into one of open war. That paradigm shift occurred when a 'stray' shell from an Israeli howitzer struck the apartments of Yassir Arafat, cremating Arafat and much of the Palestine National Authority leadership, creating a titanic power vacuum that any belligerent idiot and his brother could and probably would fill. With the death of Yassir Arafat came a whole slew of new diplomatic problems, such as the Iranians wanted this person to take over as President of the PNA, while the Syrians wanted this person, and the Americans wanted still another person, which made the entire process that much more difficult. The option to go along with the Iranians was right out because of the slight problem that most Palestinians are Sunni rather than Shiite, the Saudis and Syrians were looking for another stooge to follow their policy with no questions asked, and the Americans were doing the same thing only less forcefully. In the end, the person selected to be the new head of the Palestinian National Authority turned out to be a nobody from a town near Nazareth, Ahmed Ali, who became the leader by a happy accident, at least for him. He was the type that really was not supposed to be the president of anything, for he possessed barely even mediocre skills in politics, public speaking, law in any form, or foreign relations, so he was mostly controlled by his deputy, a much more forceful man by the name of Saif Al-Adel, an Egyptian.

Al-Adel happened to be a known terrorist, hiding out under one of his many aliases as Mohammed Nazar, and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations wanted him for ties to the 1998 Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. He had a death mark on his head if he were ever handed over to the Tanzanians or the Kenyans, and it was given that in the current political climate that the death penalty would be the least of his worries if caught by the United States. He had been working for over two and a half years on personal orders from the Director on assisting the glorious struggle of the 'oppressed' Muslims and to help destroy Israel, the puppet of the evil empire of America, the Jews and the Zionists who controlled that puppet and America herself. Now he was in a position to accomplish one of those goals, and through this, he knew Allah would reward him with a paradise beyond mortal comprehension for causing the deaths of the infidels who had contaminated the Holy Lands. He had helped cripple the evil empire in the Gregorian calendar year of 1998, and that had guaranteed him that Allah would grant him his seventy-two virgins, the endless prosperity described to the Prophet, and all the other honorably earned rewards in Jannah. The first thing he did to weaken the Israeli position was to have Ahmed denounce the accidental artillery strike as a deliberate plot to destabilize the Palestinian nation as well as to murder a beloved leader and devout Moslem in cold blood. With the recent tensions between the two neighbors, the suspension of disbelief was running at an all time high, making most of the people more suspicious and nervous than Tweek after a few gallons of high-octane coffee with a pound sugar mixed in. This also meant that all sorts of bizarre and highly improbable conspiracy theories were coming out of the woodwork, such a very popular one stating that the person who actually killed Arafat was the long-dead American president John Kennedy; hey don't look at me like that, I don't make the news, I just report it. Most of the people were ready to believe the first plausible explanation for the recent events in the world, and more than few listened to and accepted the insane as both fact and the probable reasons for the outbreaks of war that sprung up over the last two weeks, which made a dangerous cocktail.

The real trouble started when a militant faction of the Palestine Liberation Front decided that the new government was being too reactionary for their tastes, and thus they took martial matters into their own warmongering hands. They numbered only a few more than a thousand, but with the guerrilla warfare tactics they used and the funding from numerous terrorist organizations they could purchase any weaponry in the world with no problems, which meant they could rival a full battalion of Green Berets in combat effectiveness. They took it upon themselves to complete the "liberation" of the Palestinians, quite happily ignoring the fact that over the past decade, Palestine had gained several hundred square kilometers thanks to the so-termed enlightened Clinton administration and its efforts at making a lasting peace within the region. What President Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeline Albright failed to take into account, however, was the reality that this was an all or nothing deal for both sides, with neither party giving an inch, for once that happened, well there goes a mile. Neither nation would willingly agree to terms that looked to favor the other side, so they were all too happy to allow negotiations to stagnate and eventually wither away into insignificance while they locked horns in an endless succession of tit-for-tat retaliations for attacks that the other committed in retaliation. The splinter group first began spreading shameless propaganda leaflets that showed the Israelis doing appalling things to the prophet Mohammad, and they marked them with the insignia of the Israeli government along with a forged signature of Ariel Sharon on the leaflets, authorizing their dissemination. This naturally stirred up both the Islamic portion of the nation and the non-Moslems who became offended at the sheer irreverence displayed by the pamphlets, and this strengthened the convictions of the war hawks. By the time, Ariel Sharon issued a public statement denying the complicity of the government of Israel in the conception, design or dissemination of the leaflets, it was far too late to matter. The populations were ready for war, and they were steamrolling towards a path that could only be entered into, but once one starts walking the path, you had better have the guts to walk the whole damn thing, because there is no easy out.

The siege officially started when a force of more than 150 terrorists took over the forward offices of the Israeli defense Ministry, holding several of the highest-ranking military officials, including the three persons needed to activate the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Also among the hostages was Condoleezza Rice, the Deputy Secretary of State of the US, Jonathan Marlstone the deputy Foreign Secretary of the UK, and Moshe Katsav, the president of the State of Israel. The first thing the terrorists did was to round up all the high-ranking foreign nationals, military leaders and other persons of strategic value and place them at strong points through out the complex, and position several sentries around the aforementioned strong points. Next, they confiscated all cell phones, pagers, BlackBerries, digital cameras, Wi-Fi capable notebooks and just about any other communication device that could relay unapproved messages and useful tactical information to the outside world. They then began confiscating as many weapons as possible, such as the personal sidearms most of the military personnel carried with them and the various other implements of pain that they found, including such things as melon ballers, staplers and computer keyboards. Finally, a small detachment activated the internal defense systems of the building using the controls in sub-basement C, essentially locking everyone inside, in addition to making unauthorized movement beyond difficult. After the setup was finished, they sent a video message through the internet to several news agencies including Al Jazeera, FOX, NBC, the BBC and CNN, to ensure that the world understood the cause for their extreme and somewhat illogical actions. Within minutes, every television station on the planet was delivering the classic "We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this important news bulletin" message and showing the video with a running commentary on the events in the video. The pictures of the various foreign dignitaries forced the United Nations to send in one of the quick response negotiation teams they had set up in the mid 1990s just in case something like this occurred, although their true effectiveness remained unknown. The video the group had sent out had made some of their demands clear, vis-à-vis Ariel Sharon stepping down as the PM of Israel, and the total dissolution of the State of Israel to make way for the Islamic Republic of Palestine, and several other outrageous demands. The United States considered the course of action taken by the UN to be the cowards' way out, as the US had never negotiated with terrorists and thus far had come out unharmed, or at least with no visible wounds worthy of actual mention.

The President of the United States personally delivered a statement to the terrorists, one filled with righteous anger at the brazen attempt at intimidation, particularly when cooperation would let you live oh so much longer. When he was off the air, the first thing he did was to activate an extreme deep cover agent who was a prisoner along with Miss Rice, and who was posing as a bodyguard assigned to her by the Israeli government. His training was some of the most extensive in the world, making him probably the most lethal man on the planet as he could think of more than sixty ways to kill someone with a Popsicle stick, and more than a hundred with ten feet of string. When the Defense Intelligence Agency inserted him more than ten years ago, he had thought that they would never actually call upon him to use the skills they had taught him at the special section at Quantico, nor the spec-ops tactics of the Nightstalkers taught at Fort Campbell. Now agent BARNSTORMER activated, and he had to get to the internal defense grid and shut it down, to make the way at least semi-clear for the Israeli special operations team that surely was waiting outside with enough firepower to take down a full company. He quietly killed the single guard watching over him and several other personal bodyguards by snapping his neck when the guard turned to examine a picture on the wall of the office, and then he picked up the M-16A4, ammunition cartridges and the security pass card that the former terrorist had been carrying. He slipped out of the office with two men and one woman, sending the other group of four the opposite direction down the corridor, while his group moved in a crouching position towards the emergency exit stairwell. They met only three sentries on the way to the stairwell, and all quickly disposed of by a rifle butt to the head, and their weapons, ammunition and pass cards found themselves swiftly appropriated by the unarmed members of the group. When they arrived at the stairwell, a problem presented itself in full glory: when the internal defenses activated, all of the emergency exits locked down from the far side, making escape for any would be spies and saboteurs much more difficult. Combined with the fact that the doors were made of one-centimeter thick steel, this meant that the only way to get into the stairs was to shoot the lock out, and this would obviously draw unneeded and unwanted attention to their actions.

After two minutes of heated intra-group debate, the lone female, one Ivanova Katrasmiov, pointed out that eventually the terrorists would discover their little enterprise, and she would rather fight on a battlefield of her choosing than one chosen by the enemy. She raised her stolen Desert Eagle AE .50, squeezed off six rounds, three into both the top and bottom security devices, and the door swung open revealing the stairwell, light sparsely with emergency lighting, which gave them a serious tactical advantage. As soon as the first shot rang out, several insurgents came running towards the source of the shots with guns cocked and locked, ready to fire at even the slightest provocation and aiming to kill with every move. The group of four hastily made their way into the semi-darkened staircase, heading down towards the main levels where they would have to cross the lobby to get to the staircase that would take them to their final destination. As they were making their way down the stairs, BARNSTORMER heard the distinctive pings of a metal fragmentation grenade bouncing on concrete, causing him to shove the rest of the group down the six remaining stairs onto a small landing. Just as soon as all of them had gotten into the prone position, the grenade detonated on the landing above them, deafening both the bodyguards and the men who had thrown the frag grenade. Shrapnel from the grenade caught some of the terrorists in their faces, as they had forgotten that it is easier for shrapnel to travel unimpeded than it is to travel through several inches of solid concrete. As soon as possible, the three bodyguards and one deep cover agent got up off the landing and began running towards the bottom floor, barely stopping to catch their breath or to check behind them for pursuers. When they reached the last landing, they quietly undid the locks and checked the lobby after opening the door slightly; finding to their amazement and relief the lobby was nearly completely empty, with only six men stationed at the strategic points overlooking the entrance, main doors out of and the elevators. They moved as quietly as possible to places hidden from the gaze of the on-edge and heavily armed guards, each attempting to find a way to the door on the opposite side of the lobby without alerting the six muscular sentinels covering the large open space, making it a target range for any who ran across.

When they found no such route, BARNSTORMER signaled the others to open fire on the count of three; they readied their weapons, and carefully took aim at the best shot they could take. When his third finger raised a hail-storm of lead-cored, copper jacketed bullets flew, taking down two of the guards immediately and spewing their brains upon the floor behind them, while another guard was struck in the thigh by a through and through shot. The four remaining guards opened fire with their assault rifles and one M60E3 machine gun on a tripod mount, tearing into the decorative marble that covered the concrete columns, sending hundreds of rocky projectiles flying into the air. After about thirty seconds of uninterrupted fire, the guards held their fire and began to move towards the area where the shots came from to discover whether or not they had neutralized their attackers, and if needed to mop up the survivors. They found to their intense displeasure, that they had not managed to take down even one of their attackers, a fact that two of them found out when daggers, shoved into their throats, completely cut off the airflow to the lungs and severed the jugular and the carotid artery; they were dead within two minutes. The last two were killed swiftly by Miss Katrasmiov, who had managed to sneak around to their back and shot them, execution style in the back of the neck twice, what some term a 'double tap'. Katrasmiov uncoupled the M60 from the tripod and retrieved the ammo boxes from underneath the desk, giving them to Richard Broxton, another personal bodyguard of Miss Rice, to carry, giving him the following detailed and somewhat macabre forewarning. "If you drop these, or misplace them, I will personally hang you with your own intestines while they are still attached to the rest of your innards, international incident and Geneva Convention be damned, capisce?" As you would have thought, he was exceedingly vigilant in both handling and keeping track of the ammo boxes, for he and the others in their little group had no doubt that the five foot six inch tall Russian expatriate could and would very gladly do exactly as she had said, no matter that said actions went against the Geneva Convention. She once again opened the door with her Desert Eagle, except this time there was no hurried rush for the safety of the staircase, as now they were the ones going into the dragons den, and whatever hazards that might reside there would be free to assault them at will.

They made it past the basement and sub-basements A and B without so much as a scratch, but when they came to C, they found out why the lobby had been so empty and relatively undefended. When they got to the door of the sub-basement, they looked through the small identification window usually used by a sentry just inside the door to make sure that only authorized personnel made it through, but what they saw inside the corridor was beyond frightening. Positioned just on the other side of the door was several hundred kilos of C4, with wires running back to an intersection and then disappearing around a corner, which obviously meant that they connected to a detonator switch far deeper in the complex. The amount of explosive could have easily created a fatal structural instability in above levels, which would most likely lead to the complete collapse of the twelve levels above them and the death of almost everyone inside the building. They used one of the stolen pass cards to open the door, then they very cautiously made their way towards the corner that the wires went around, and cautiously peeked around the corner, and they saw several unhelpful things. The first thing they saw was another M60 on a bipod mount, and two men staffing as the gunner and loader, and the second unwelcome thing they saw were three other soldiers with very powerful automatic weapons. Luckily, Broxton thought of an ingenious solution to their problem; he went back to the large pile of C4 and unwrapped one of the 2.2 kilo blocks, which he then lit on fire and through around the corner towards the five enemy soldiers. After only a few seconds, they heard panicked shouting, and then a terrific explosion, which was exactly what he was counting on, as one of the cardinal rules when working with C4 is never ever stamp on a lit brick of the stuff unless you have a death wish. As soon as one of the panicked terrorists attempted to put the flaming explosive out by stamping the fire out, the final piece of the C4 explosion equation added into the result, and the result is predictably a great big boom. A subsequent glance around the corner revealed that Broxton's plan had worked, and all the soldiers were either dead or dieing from both the concussive energy of the explosion and the intense flash of heat produced by the explosion. Unfortunately, the blast drew out the rest of the insurgents, more than twenty in all, from the various rooms along the corridor, and soon a firefight had erupted, with quite of bit of friendly fire killings occurring. Since the corridor was comparatively narrow, only three insurgents could actually be in the front line of fire at one time, which gave the advantage to the group of four, and since they had been acquiring ammunition from the various forces they had killed, they had several tricks up their sleeves.

Katrasmiov threw a M67 frag grenade into the fray, and since the group was so tightly packed, the grenade actually caught between two of the Palestinian 'freedom' fighters, nearly blowing them apart when it detonated. Slowly, the hordes of terrorists thinned until there were none standing, and the small group made their way forward, their trigger fingers twitching at the slightest movement, and listening intently for the slightest sound that might mean an ambush. Just as they were moving into the defensive grid control room, one of the few terrorists alive raised his SiG Sauer 9 mm pistol and shot Broxton three times in the torso, making two through and through and one bullet that severed his spinal cord at the L3/L4 junction. Katrasmiov quickly shot the offending man, hitting him just above the superior temporal line on the skull, which caused the bullet to shoot through the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, annihilating any chance he had of living. They quickly pulled Broxton inside and tried their best to cleanse the wounds with the liter of Schmirnoff vodka they found stashed behind some books, but their efforts were in vain. Richard Broxton departed this world at 10:47 PM on December tenth of the year two thousand and one, leaving behind his mother, three brothers, a sister, a wife and two children, one of whom had yet to be born; his last words were "Ivanova, I didn't drop the boxes". The rest of the mission was easy, but the death of one of their now cherished comrades loomed over everything like a heavy black shroud, making all they did seem worthless by comparison, but they completed their assignment with the professionalism trained into them by years of service in various militaries. The grid deactivated and soon after the _Sayeret Duvdevan_ had cleansed the area of the militants, with more than thirty prisoners taken, and almost all of the high-ranking foreign dignitaries alive, with the exception of Jonathan Marlstone who had been tortured before shot to death. Moshe Katsav was among the living, mostly because he was able to reason with the young men guarding him, and promising them amnesty if they would make sure that the situation did not fly any farther out of control than they already had. Thankfully, the young militants listened to reason and made sure, that most of the command echelon was left relatively unharmed, and that for the most part the foreign dignitaries were treated with the respect their station commanded. When the entire episode was over, the death toll was 137 civilian employees dead, one high-ranking foreign dignitary dead, 29 minor foreigners' dead, 103 terrorists dead, and more than four hundred persons wounded.


	17. An Empire Founded

Near Plymouth, southern England, the United Kingdom

0625 GMT, 14 December 2001

The draft for the military had just been re-instated, and many people in both remaining parts of the United Kingdom were very unhappy about, including many of the senior military officials, who felt the armed services should remain professional. One soldier who was extremely happy about was Commander Daniel Billingsly of the SBS, the Special Boat Service, which is the British analog to the United States Navy SEALs, because a draft meant more of the professional soldiers would move into the more specialized and much tougher branches of the armed services. Most of the SBS officers, involuntarily sent into the newly formed Force Sigma, were envious of his position, as Daniel was now the senior officer in SBW Team One and left him with the responsibility of training a new generation on the best that the Royal Navy had to offer. He considered the training to be the best part of the job, well being the train_er_ at least, when compared to being the unfortunate train_ee_, who was lucky enough to experience six weeks of only four hours of sleep a night, standing neck deep in freezing cold water, and being verbally, physically and emotionally abused in ways that could only strengthen the character. What went in the grinder were soft, fleshy, grade-A examples of carbon based life, and throughout the training period, vaguely humanoid objects walked out of the training area, but by the end, the few that had made it through the course came out with minds and muscles of pure titanium, hardened by both experience and the trainers hand, and occasionally the instructors boot as well. The training process did not profess to be easy, or to be any form of pleasant seen this side of the Andromeda Galaxy, but it did produce some of the most excellent soldiers seen on this or any other planet. Today, Billingsly was to greet the first batch of untutored seamen, and 'familiarize' them to the style of life here at the main training centre for the SBS, something he always enjoyed. The horrified looks on the faces of most of the recruits was one of the simple things in life to cherish, and then at the end of the day telling them they had to find their own shelter, it became an 'every man for himself' brouhaha, which the instructors watched with night vision goggles, bowls of popcorn and great amusement. The entire experience, designed to break a person down into the individual parts, rebuild them into a precision instrument of warfare, break them down once more, and if there was enough time rebuild them once more, was one of the finest programs in the world.

They started with three hours of intense physical training, doing such exercises as the side-straddle hop, mule kicks, ski jumps, supine bicycles and dozens of other aerobics that both loosened their physique and exhausted them. After that, the instructors divided the trainees into seven teams, which would become like family over the next six weeks, sharing in their triumphs and their failures, and they would become a tightly woven family-type entity. The teams, made irrespective of gender, race, creed and whether one could utilize magic or not, would serve to strengthen the bonds of fellowship between the mundane and magical realms, a thing most desperately needed in the coming months. When the teams finally amassed at assembly area Blue, the supervisors guided them to the eight-kilometer obstacle course that they would run this first day, which would determine their physical, mental and tactical abilities, and their ability to work as a team. The obstacle course consisted of six sets of obstacles on an eight-kilometer track, with two squads of SBS veterans operating paint-ball guns to simulate gunfire from enemy combatants, which would measure the tactical expertise of the teams. The individual teams, sent through the course one at a time, found themselves graded on how quickly they completed the course, how many members of their team made it across the finish line and how many times members of their team had been hit with paintballs and where they had been hit. Before they ran the course, the recruits donned the plain white sweatshirts and sweat pants they would serve as the backdrops to the splotches of paint that would assuredly color their clothing by days end, and to make identification of hits easier. If one had more than three splotches of paint the torso, or one near the carotids or the sub-clavian arteries, you automatically counted as dead, and that would in turn reduce the score for the entire squad, which would in turn result in more intense and grueling exercises. The first obstacle that the teams encountered was from the White group of the US Army Field Manual 21-20, the Tough Nut which is a devilish contrivance of sets of four-inch thick wooden poles set up in huge X shapes, which the trainees had to get over carefully or risk damage to certain most likely valuable parts of their anatomy.

After that came a mix of different obstacles from all four groups, including the Island Hopper, the Skyscraper, an inclining wall, and a five-foot high low wall to spring over; overall, it was a challenging group of obstacles, which many had difficulty navigating. Several of the people, both mundane and magical, fell while jumping from the various stumps in the Island Hopper and sprained their ankles, while one actually broke his metacarpals in three places along with a sprained ankle. The rest made it through the first set with no problems, and after that it was smooth sailing, at least until they met the first squad of 'attackers' who decimated them by hiding behind trees and using guerilla fighting techniques. The first group looked like they had bathed in the brilliant florescent colors, for they looked like characters from some inane and harebrained children's show, a kaleidoscope of Day-Glo orange, yellow, lime green and bright blue, an impossible target to miss in the homogeneous brown of the winter woods. As they passed the battle positions, the squad radioed ahead to the other and told them to stand down for the time being as the current group had failed spectacularly at the stealth and tactical evaluations, although any of those persons who wanted to take potshots were welcome to take them. The second group was only a little better than the first when it came to stealth, for instead of imitating a herd of elephants moving through the jungle, they made about the same noise as a rack of pots and pans dropping to the floor, although this wasn't much of an improvement in any sense. They managed to make it out of the target range with almost half of their original white showing, which made them feel very proud, as the six remaining squads had named the previous group the 'rainbow cadets'. The majority of the other units were about the same level as the second, except for the sixth squad, which showed astonishing skills in both surreptitiousness and strategy, and they were even able to take down four of the paintball snipers and appropriate their weapons, a thing for which they received a special commendation. They were the only group to make it through the course with all of their members intact and mobile, as all of the other units had members that had sustained some sort of injury, mostly minor fractures, sprained limbs and a couple of torn ligaments and popped tendons.

When the demographics of the different groups was broken down, it was revealed that the magical personnel were 34 percent more likely to stop from exhaustion, and almost 20 percent more likely to sustain more hits from a paintball shooter. All that meant was that the magical portion of the resident populace would be working out harder, longer and much more frequently in order to bring them up to battle-ready status and to bring them to the basic minimum standards of the British Armed Forces, as defined by STANAG 127A. The three kilometer swim in the afternoon was an absolute and undeniable disaster, for while the entirety of the mundane recruits could swim quite adeptly, it seemed there had been a major misunderstanding within the magical cadre sent to them. The remaining Aurors had had the choice of going to any number of training programs, and reportedly, when many had chosen to come to the SBS training centre, they had focused on one misleading word, which happened to be boat. For some ungodly reason they believed they would be training on boats the entire time, and they would never have to get physically in the water throughout the entire training period, thus they never considered the irrationality of signing up for a Royal _**Navy**_ program coupled with not knowing how to swim. When several recruits refused to get in the water, the drill sergeants took this as the very first cases of goldbricking, which they answered by roughly picking up the complainers and throwing them into the small bay right off the nearby dock. Almost immediately, Cmdr. Billingsly knew that this would not end well, and he had a distinct feeling that he should get the sergeants into the water to fish out the by now waterlogged men and women before any permanent and potentially politically damaging casualties occurred. Even with the entire country in a state of partial anarchy, the one thing that they counted on was that there were most likely two species that had survived the nuclear blasts, cockroaches and lawyers, although which is which is anybodies guess. With the pond scum known as attorneys still alive and kicking, Cmdr. Billingsly was completely sure that should any injuries more serious than a broken leg be reported, they would subsequently be grossly exaggerated, the consequences inflated and the entire matter complicated beyond all conceivable reasons. Thus, any major injury could quite possibly destroy the tenuous détente that the two halves of the British government had joined to create, and with an enemy who could literally disappear into thin air, every ally was a cherished friend and one to protect and aid in any way possible.

Unfortunately, one such casualty did occur, and the man who became an unfortunate statistic was one Horton Willington, a junior grade Auror from a long lineage of magical persons, who had a matching set of both soft muscles and a soft head. He had believed that due to his heritage and wealth, he was entitled to certain special treatment, and he told the supervisors of this belief, which did nothing to enamor him to them. To disabuse him of this notion, they decided to give him special treatment, although not the nice kind of special; he ran ten laps around the perimeter of the compound with a sergeant making him keep pace by slapping his thighs with a telescoping baton. By the time he made it to the pier, the backs of his legs felt like they had gone ten rounds with a meat tenderizer and had lost in every round, and the rest of his body was nearly screaming in anguish, begging his brain not to do anything stupid. However, Mr. Willington still held on to the screwball conception that his ancestry entitled him to special treatment and no amount of physical, mental or emotional maltreatment inflicted upon his person could shake this impression loose from its crevice. When Mr. Willington reiterated his foolish belief, the sergeants took this as a sign that his spirit had not yet been broken, which would not normally bother them on the first day, but this was an accelerated program, where trainees should be crying for their mommies with the first twelve hours. Thus, several of the instructors picked him up and hurled him at least ten feet into the water, where they watched him floundering -which they did not respond to because they thought it was a ploy for sympathy- and sputtering in the frigid north Atlantic waters. He went under twice before the instructors began to realize that this was definitely not a ploy for preferential treatment, and some of the on-hand lifeguards hastily shrugged off their toggle coats and dove in to save the man. The current had steadily carried him farther and farther from shore and by the time the lifeguards got to him he was floating face down nearly 30 meters from the shoreline, and he wasn't breathing or moving under his own power. They got him out of the water in less than a minute, and they quickly performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, desperately hoping that the man would be all right, although they knew in their hearts that the chances of that possibility were steadily getting more and more distant with every passing second.

They managed to revive him, but he did not respond to their attempts at making sure he was not in a state of shock; they quickly loaded him onto the medevac helicopter that they had on the base in case of an emergency, which then flew as fast as possible to the nearest surviving hospital. When thoroughly examined later, the doctors discovered that his brain had been cut-off from the life giving oxygen molecules for too long, and at least twenty percent of his brain cells had died off, leaving him little more than a vegetable, with some rudimentary language skills. Almost immediately, the media showed their double faces, taking down everyone's account of what happened, misquoting whoever they interviewed at their leisure with little regard for the consequences, and adding in random facts that had little to no basis in reality, all of which added up to a situation even more screwed up than it already was. Next, the journalists latched onto some of the recruits who somehow managed to come along to attend to the injured man, and the process started all over again, although their stories made every supervisor in some form of a sadistic maniac who had found a perfect way of combining work and pleasure. Most of the truth was so badly distorted, that by the time the story went to the Associated Press main offices in New York or the Reuters internet servers in Milan, only a third of what was reported was actually true, evidenced by the fact that the final story had a boat accident and a summary execution thrown into the mix. The Willington family was one of the more ancient lines of the British magical realm, and they had substantial pecuniary investments through out the magical dominion, with some moderate investments in the mundane world as well, putting their family in the top 25 wealthiest families in Europe. When the remaining members of clan Willington heard about the tragic accident that befell young Horton, they automatically did what any bourgeois elitist would in those circumstances: they began figuring out who was the most responsible, and then they would set to work on bringing those persons to ruin, be it physical, mental or financial, although they preferred financial.

Throughout the magical realm, the Willingtons were notorious windbags, who had all the political subtlety of smashing someone's head in with a shovel, the tact of a loudmouthed drunkard and all the intelligence of a colony of termites without their queen, making them proverbial loose cannons. When they got a hold of a harebrained idea, they pursued said idea with single-minded obsession, acting, as would the Zax, never taking a step to the right nor the left, although when combined with their inordinately short attention spans, they made very impassioned and bewildering campaigns, which often accomplished very little. They were also rabble-rousers of the worst kind, not above paying indifferent persons to espouse their views, or paying reports to "uncover" new evidence of wrongdoing with the proper amount of slightly preposterous sensationalism thrown in for good measure. However, they were now in an arena where combat was dictated by a slightly different set of rules, not as different as to be incomprehensible, but just enough that the players were kept off balance and more than a little perturbed. With every euro they threw into getting the "truth" published or shown to the world, they paradoxically both strengthened their own position and weakened it, as received much sympathy from the various liberal groups, and with the conservatives, they found themselves thrown out of the country club for daring to criticize the decisions of both the monarch and her government. After several days, most of the family lost interest in stirring up trouble, and thus they moved on to other equally vacuous projects with equally inane goals. The few immediate family members who persisted in continuing the bizarre crusade were nowhere near as effective as when the whole of the vast resources of the Willington trust were behind them. In the next three weeks after the debacle, the media gradually sorted out most of what was fact and what was fiction, although the summary execution was still widely regarded as truth. The ripples from this seemingly small event would stretch out for years to come, affecting countries on the other side of the globe, and spreading a wave of unease very quickly.

Near the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, France

1125 GMT (12:25 PM Local), 14 December 2001

The magically enhanced Dutch army conquered almost all of northern and eastern France, with minor pockets of resistance near Saint Lô, Caen, Cherbourg, Brest, all along the length of the rivers Rhine, Seine and Meuse, with a major resistance force at Strasbourg. The magically enhanced Dutch Army moved swiftly, occupying thousands of square miles, but with them came something that the French army had never seen before: heavily armored battle trolls, which look very similar to those in the third Lord of the Rings film. Weighing in at just over three tons, a single battle troll could easily devastate an entire platoon of infantry, as they were strong enough to pick up any standard civilian auto within their nine-foot reach and send it more than a mile from its starting position, and their elephant like skin could stop tank-buster slugs cold. Three divisions of these armored monstrosities spearheaded the drive to Paris, eliminating everything in their path, leaving men, women and children with their entire skeletal structures shattered by blows of immense force. With every passing hour the Dutch gained ground and on the previous day they had reached the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, and they had begun a massive double envelopment of the French capital, while dividing the remainder of the French army into parts in the centre and near the Pyrenees. At 1015 they had completely encircled the city an began tightening the noose the had made around the city, and the first demands of surrender had been delivered to Jacque Chirac, and even though he had bravely stayed in the city when the invasion had first started, he held no delusions of breaking out of the cordon. His staff quickly arranged to set up an underground, in much the same fashion of the Free French forces of the Second World War, and they began arranging for several of the high-ranking military officials to make their final orders to the troops before hiding them away. Chirac knew that by acquiescing to the surrender demands, he was effectively committing political suicide, and that his name would be yet another among the stereotypical French cowards. However, by taking these actions, he allowed the Fifth Republic to live on, and his actions saved the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers, as the High Courts recognized later on at his trial for aiding and abetting the enemy.

The commander of the Dutch forces demanded that the surrender take place at the Arc de Triomphe, intended to be a jab at the proud martial history of the French people, which now is only read about in books, and at the spirit of the people themselves. The psychological warfare tactic was essentially the same as when Adolf Hitler made the French surrender in the same railway car that they had forced the German Empire to surrender in 1918, and it was equally as effective at demoralization. Just before the military command, left to attend the surrender as demanded, they sent a final transmission in the name of the Fifth Republic, ordering all remaining commands to implement a scorched earth policy, leaving nothing for the enemy with any industrial, military or civil value. The first area this policy implemented in was the Bordeaux vineyards and wineries, destroying an entire generation of wine, worth more than 4.2 million Euros. As soon as the rest of the commands received the message, they began the sad duty of destroying their homeland, placing explosives in every factory, every dry dock, every building which had any sort of military or industrial value, and making sure that the invaders would use them for their own ends. The port of Toulouse on the southern coast, emptied in record time, and then all the ships that could not make it out of the port blasted into slag from a prolonged barrage, which destroyed most of the naval base as well, thereby eliminating the possible usage of the harbor facilities. All over France, this scene was repeating itself, airport runways crudely cratered, underground nuclear storage facilities sealed shut, missile silos destroyed with the missiles inside, and all sorts of other destruction occurred in cities throughout the unconquered parts of the country. Entire cities became massive firestorms that enveloped thousands of square kilometers, creating smoke plumes that could be seen from space, and the fires killed more than five thousand people who were in buildings that caught fire from those next to them. Most of the French Air force had already transferred over to Spain and Germany, as planes on the ground in enemy territory are worth nothing, while planes in a friendly country can be worth more than their weight in gold.

Theoretically, as soon as the surrender agreement was sign, the scorched earth actions should have immediately stopped, but the French knew that very rarely did the victor ever keep his promises to the loser. Thus, the French forces blithely ignored the incoming orders to stand down, which made for a very malevolent surprise for the Dutch, and the magical mercenaries accompanying them on their modern day blitzkrieg across the Frankish countryside. At every crossroads and other convenient area, landmines, Czech hedgehogs, dragons' teeth, and other counter-mobility emplacements were hastily erected to impede the progress of the quote-unquote victorious Dutch. More than once, engineers dynamited abandoned buildings so that they would fall across the road, and create an impassable roadblock far beyond the degree of any constructed obstacle that they could make in the short time they had allotted to them. Those that could make it across the borders into Italy, Switzerland, Andorra and Spain were encouraged to do so as speedily as possible, as it was most probable that they would find only fatality should they stay in country. More than two divisions made it across the border into Italy, Switzerland and Spain each, with dozens of advanced prototypes of APCs, tanks, UAVs and many other types of military projects with them. In Paris, clerks and secretaries frantically burned the secret and above documents to prevent the world from learning precisely where the DIGN and GIGN had international agents in less than legal roles, and what they knew as a result. The newborn provisional government arrested President Chirac along with all the other French attendees of the surrender ceremony and sent them to one of the prison camp set up near the former Belgian border. The PM, Lionel Robert Jospin had been in Uganda on an international relations tour, and he became the head of the government-in-exile based in America, which many thought too far away and heavily defended to eliminate.

The hundreds of demolitions reduced many cities to large piles of rubble and nearly destroyed the whole of the French industrial capacity, along with billions of euros in products, trade goods and many other exporting items. By the time the Dutch arrived in the southwestern cities, sections of the countryside looked as if a tremendous fire had swept over the hills and valleys of the land, baking both the earth and anything aboveground within a radius of 350 meters. At the factories where the AMX tank series produced, now there were only piles of debris the size of small mountains, intermixed with semi-molten pools of slag that had once been fighting machines of exceptional caliber. They very quickly cottoned on to what the final orders of the French military were, and the generals could not help being impressed by the foresight the military had shown, although they also knew they themselves would be punished for not arriving in time to save some of the industrial works. Two hours after the Dutch had received the final confirmation of the surrender, Wim Kok, the de facto head of state and the former Prime Minister officially asked the Dark Lord Voldemort to assume control over the conquered territories and to consider it a tribute to his magnificence. According to partially destroyed Dutch records, they received an affirmative reply in less than ten minutes, although according to eyewitness statements, there was a considerable gap between the sending and the reply. With the large amount of new territory in his possession, the Dark Lord felt that he had surpassed the size and grandeur of the title of Lord, and thus he named himself "The Imperial Ruler and Savior of the Earth and Magical Realms, Grand Emperor Voldemort." This only served to prove the man was a megalomaniac and he definitely had a bizarre savior complex, but this is where he first gained enough power to affect global events, and to have territory holdings on par with historical empires.

The remains of East (Palestinian) Jerusalem, Israeli-controlled Palestine

2115 GMT (11:15 PM Local), 14 December 2001

The reprisals sought by the Israelis for the attack on the Defense outpost were swift and brutal in nature, with destruction rarely seen outside of nuclear blast zones, and hardly a single building left intact and/or standing. The Israeli Army came down on the West Bank like a sledgehammer, cutting down anything in their way, be it flesh, stone, metal or wood, and nothing was safe from the holocaust that followed, not women or children, not even the many mosques dotting the landscape. The Israeli armor destroyed the many mosques with particular violence, many times when the afternoon prayers were just starting, trapping hundreds of people inside, burying them with mountains of detritus. Entire residential sections were razed, and anyone resisting the soldiers was given a one-way ticket on the midnight train to slab city via copper jacketed slugs and Isaac Newton's second law put into practice. The slaughter of the West Bank was one of the early atrocities of the Third World War, but when compared in terms of utter viciousness, it earned a rating of one of the top five military atrocities ever created, below the Holocaust but above the My Lai Massacre. Their were far too many bodies to bury, so most of the time they were piled up in the middle of the roads and set afire, creating clouds of ash which mostly dropped into the river Jordan, thus contaminating the Dead Sea for decades to come. The Palestinian government had fled into Jordan for the time being, to avoid the fate that had consumed so many of the little people who had elevated them to their positions, but now were only cannon fodder for the great governmental machine who used them callously as human shields. Once a person gains power, it is almost inevitable that they begin to misuse it, or will allow said power to buy for specious and often time's dangerous reasons, however the greatest misuse of power is to abandon the people who depend on appropriate use of that power. Every government in the world had seen this happen, mostly in third world countries such as Uganda with Idi Amin, and Chile with August Pinochet, but even the superpowers of Russia, Britain and America are rife with it. The American congress is an extremely apt example, with every single person who the people elect there, already bought and paid for by the tobacco, oil, health care and pharmaceutical industries, little more than puppets with only the shadows of the lofty ideals they once had before.

To Saif Al-Adel, the Palestinian people were expendable because they did not have the strength of will to do the work that Allah had tasked them with; they had not destroyed the infidels and the Zionists who would gladly destroy the one true faith to further their own ambitions. He considered anyone who had not personally killed an infidel to be what the Western devils would call a poser, one who is not truly committed to the path laid down by the Koran and the 1200-plus verses devoted to the fate of non-believers. He had already begun gathering sympathetic forces from the newly secular Iraq, who found the Baath party to be too non-religious for their tastes, and simply too socialist to please their delicate palates. Saddam was quickly undoing the so called "de-Baathification" ordered by the former American President G. H. W. Bush, much to the relief of the nation, as without the secular government, nothing was done and the state of post-conflict reconstruction and chaos seemed to become perpetual. Unfortunately, to achieve the results he wanted, he had to rattle many sabers, and most of these belonged to the many clerics who were eternally squabbling over the most frivolous and unfathomable problems, which any semi-sane person could solve with a simple use of logic. However, as always, religion and logic mix as do oil and water or gasoline and fire, depending on what amount of a religion examined with a critical, dispassionate, and impartial eye, as even a little bit of bible-thumping can go a long way. While the Sunnis and the Shiites were squabbling over even the most basic of operations, the new government became divided between the two factions and the Kurdish minority, making a peaceful solution that much farther away. To Adel, Saddam was a wallflower, a pacifist who was a paltry puppet of the West, whom the puppeteers only mildly rebuked during the course of Desert Storm, and thus he was a traitor to all Muslims for allowing the imperialists to set foot on his soil.

Adel believed that he had transferred the government secretly, and that from here he would be able to orchestrate the demise of the Zionist management of the Jews in the Holy Land, and thus cleanse the land of all impurities, which sullied the earth. He had previously arranged with the Jordanian royal family for safe passage and protection should the Israelis decide to liquidate the two small areas of Palestinian control, or should the condition of open war ever arise. The more support he could garner from the outside world, the more likely it was that their neighboring nations, all of whom happened to be Islamic and many theocracies within that bunch, would put the Israelis back in their place in the world, rightfully at the bottom of the heap. The few civilians that made it out of the West Bank found themselves inundated with semi-fictionalized reports of the horrors of their former hometowns, which detailed the desecration of mosques and the murder of persons regardless of who they were. That lit a flame underneath them, making all who read, heard and saw the stories over the many news mediums cry out in anger, making them demand retribution on the sacrilegious invaders of their 'peaceful' nation. The provisional government of Palestine was overjoyed at the pledges of assistance they received, which came from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Hamas, the PLO, Hezbollah, and even the Kingdom of Bahrain, all of which would ship money and other necessary supplies to Jordan. He also began gathering as much war material as he could, leasing almost half of the combat arm of the Royal Jordanian Air Force with money which he did not actually have or would ever have, thus introducing the concept of imaginary numbers to diplomatic arrangements. He counted on all of these actions committed with the most conceivable secrecy, so as not to tip off either the Coalition or the Israelis, both of whom would quickly brand them as warmongers and they would quickly find themselves on the business end of an international taskforce.

What he did not count on was the now eternal Big Brother service, provided by the United States, with its vast networks of reconnaissance satellites, the hundreds of surveillance aircraft in its air fleet and the new Aurora space planes, which could take pictures of his individual eyelashes, accurate to 2-micrometers, from 50 miles up. Nor did he suspect that nearly every computer system on the planet had an automated program that sent copies of just about every file modified to the computer analysis labs at Quantico, Atlanta and Chicago for decoding and interpretation, so any electronic information was fair game. The US surveillance policy was "If it happened, don't bother telling us, we know about it already", making the globe a much smaller place with much less privacy for anybody on the surface of said globe, the quintessential essence of Big Brother. The KH-14 spy satellite constellations and the computer programs had picked up every single movement made by both sides, and now the US had sufficient information to play both sides of the fence like a well-tuned violin, and to make both sides bend to their wishes. They could easily tell the Jordanians that they had lent most of their combat aircraft to a state with almost no real collateral, or they could tell the Israelis precisely where the Palestinian command authority now headquartered, thus ensuring its destruction. In short, the United States had both participants by the shorthairs, and they could very easily turn the tide in either direction with very few direct consequences. Historically, the US had traditionally sided with Israel on most issues, but with the distinct lack of military presence in the region made them play things decidedly closer to the vest, and made them look at all nations as potential enemies. Without any authentic or immediate threats to their own security, however, the USA decided that they would let the situation unfold a little more before making any potentially foolhardy or irrational moves.


	18. Honor, Courage and Commitment

Newcastle, England, the United Kingdom

0825 GMT, 21 December 2001

Harry Potter walked up to the Colonel who was handing out the individual assignments for the members of Force Sigma, and when he found out his particular assignment, he was, shall we say, less than pleased.

"Hey Harry! What's your assignment? Mine is a PR and recruiting tour through Scotland and all of its wonders and peoples." Neville Longbottom, Harry's best friend, asked him excitedly.

"I don't believe it. I just don't fucking believe it. Why would they send **me** of all people to pick that bitch up?" He continued in his own monologue almost as if he had not even heard Neville.

"Harry, focus, we have met a lot of women who could qualify for the title of bitch. Now which one are you talking about, maybe it's the one who tried to poison Gabby, you know Lavender."

"Neville, I am talking about _the_ bitch, the one with a capital B. I am fairly sure you remember the one woman who tried to kill me on four separate occasions, two of which you were present for." Exasperated, Harry looked at Nev with a slightly incredulous look, as if daring him to say he had forgotten the numerous and sometimes bizarre attempts on his life.

"Of course I remember those two times, mostly because I nearly bought the farm wholesale, first from that snake, and then from that falling sculpture. I never have figured out exactly why she would try to kill you with a snake, when you can speak to them, but then again, do I really want to know how her mind works?"

"Probably no, but anyway, she was captured in Germany about two weeks ago, in the aftermath of a firefight between the Bundeswehr and the Danish Army. The Germans took her to some place near Munich, a psych hospital, and they have not been able to make heads nor tails of her, so they decided that they should extradite her here, to persons who quote-unquote 'know her better'. Personally, I think she is completely insane, and this is supported by the fact that up until two weeks ago, I was receiving daily 'love notes' from her. She kept on blathering about how we would be so happy living together, with our three children, named Lily, James and _Albus Severus_. Why in the nine circles of hell would I name anything after those two god damned manipulative assholes, unless I was going to destroy the so-named thing soon after and in a very violent way? I spend at least an hour every day sticking pins into little Dumbledore and Snape dolls, which is usually a good indication that you hate someone, is it not? You should know, because you have seen what I play darts with; I mean I only have three boards and each one has a different face on it."

Completely ignoring the ranting portion of his friend's diatribe, Neville focused on the more important aspects of Harry's ramblings, which came up whenever someone mentioned the obsessive red haired witch. "They captured her alive?! Last time we saw her, she took out an entire squad of twenty Hit Wizards and half of 'em in hand to hand combat, in which she did admittedly have the advantage. I would have thought it would have taken a frickin' tank to get her down without severe casualties, or at least without having to paralyze her from the waist down, although to be honest, she scares the bloody hell out of me."

Smiling grimly, Harry said, "From the rumors I hear, it took a squad of tanks to knock her for a loop, and from the little I have heard through the diplomatic channels, it took nearly ten people to hold her in the isolation unit of the hospital."

With much sarcasm, Neville told Harry in a deadpan monotone voice, "Thank oh so much. You have just given me something new to put in my nightmares, along with the old Bat pleasuring himself and the sight of Dumbledore, Flitwick and Moody in a ménage à trois."

"Where in bleeding heck do you come up with those things you nutter? Just saying those ungodly images made me lose my appetite and probably destroyed my libido for the next few years, and if that has happened, you would do best avoiding Gabby for the duration."

"Why do you call them ungodly, I though you were an atheist?"

"No, I'm a Pagan. That, however, is completely beside the point, which is that I am telling you that your imagination is down in depths few dare to tread."

Just then, Terry Boot, an ever-annoying bug on the windshield of life, chirped into the conversation, adding quite unhelpfully, "You might want to leave on that tour now; otherwise she might kill you before she leaves on her assignment to the Pyrenees."

"Thank you for the smashing advice Terr; maybe next you could go inform Weasely twins that they are related, because that is the only thing more obvious than what you just said." Neville said, while shoving the intruder away rather violently. As he did so, he gave a fair impersonation of the Snape Glare of Death©, and although it was no substitute for the real thing, he had made it his own way of announcing "Cave Canem".

As they reached the area where the helicopters were waiting for the various passengers, Harry told them, "Well gentlemen, this is my stop. Thank you all for coming and I must bid you adieu and goodbye." He ran up to the V-22 that would ferry him to Sweden, and from there he would move to Finland, after that came just to the east of Moscow, then Poland and finally into the heart of Bavarian Germany, where he would be joined by six heavily armed guards who would escort both he and the prisoner back to England.

On the tilt-rotor, he found out that the route back to England would take him through Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Egypt, Turkey, Lithuania and Sweden twice, making him ponder whether the routes had been planned by Mad Eye, so that no would follow them. He also found out that for this mission his superiors would give him a new weapon, built by the Americans, something they called a Shrike assault machine gun, which he figured would probably be enough to keep Ginerva Weasely under control. Moreover, if it did not manage to deter her, he always had his Desert Eagle with him, to drive home any point might want to make, or he could just say he caught her trying to escape. With only a couple of sputters the twin piston engines came to life, surrounding him with the quick and steady thrumming of the cross-rotor connection, slowly lulling him to a deep dreamless sleep, something he didn't get enough of.

Just off the coast of Fujian, the South China Seas

1621 GMT, 21 December 2001 (12:21 Local, 22 December 2001)

VAdm. Delilah Porter and fifteen other SEALs were riding in a C-130J Super Hercules, waiting for the drop signal, which would send them out the back into wild blue yonder, and into the execution of a HALO jump.

"Okay ladies and gentlemen, I want no mistakes on this mission. When we land, put your NVGs on mode two, and make sure that you shake any fleas, am I clear?"

In unison, fourteen of those present gave a load and clear answer of "Yes, ma'am!"

The only one who did not answer the admiral was First Lieutenant Zolfo Zale, who was the second oldest of the team, after the admiral herself, and he had the amazing talent of being able to sleep on a demolitions range, through an air raid, some even thought he could sleep through Pearl Harbor. He was a language specialist in both Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, the team considered him an invaluable resource on any mission in Southeast Asia, and he was fairly versed in some of the other widespread languages of the area, such as Vietnamese and Cambodian.

She shook him out of his slumber in her own, "gentle and tender" way: by squirting a tiny bit of lemon juice into his left eye, thus waking him up and ensuring that he would be awake for the next few hours or so. An unfortunate side effect of her signature wakeup call however is that for the next 45 minutes or so, he would be unable to stop blinking, and his vision would be blurry for the next half hour, unless of course he splashed some water into his eyes, which is why he always carried a bottle of distilled water on his person.

"AAAHH! You god damned sadistic fuck; you could have just punched me in the shoulder! That is how everyone else wakes me up you know that very well! Oh, God that stings like nothing else." This is Zale, a somewhat salt-and-pepper man with many scars from former operations with USSOCOM, and a past very few know of or ever will, and even fewer will muster up the courage to ask about it.

"Well, I'm sorry Zale, but I'm not everyone else am I? You know that I reserve that little treatment for those who fall asleep when I am speaking, so you know you had to pay the piper." Her already harsh features twisted into a cruel smile, making some of the FNG's shudder at the downright spine-chilling sight, and even some of those who had worked with her grimaced.

"OK, ma'am, I get the point. Now could you please stop smiling, it's utterly disturbing to see something like that smiling."

Just then, before the admiral could jab at Zale for his commentary, the entire cargo area was bathed in a red light, letting all those inside know they were over the drop zone, and this caused a veritable snowstorm of action.

The jump supervisor stood by the back ramp, waiting for the ramp to stop moving. As soon as it was stationary, he called out to the waiting SEALs.

"Okay ladies; let's get your sorry asses out of the plane and onto the ground. Go! Go! Go!"

Within two minutes, every one of the SEALs had jumped out, and the Hercules turned for home, releasing flares and bursts of chaff to draw several SA-3 GOA and Kai Shan missiles away from its body, which might make for an early end to its service life.

As they fell, they saw bright flashes of ack-ack bursting below them, as it seemed that the radar operators had misjudged the Hercules' correct altitude by nearly three thousand feet, although how this happened, is still under some debate. Normally a HALO jump is dangerous enough even in perfect conditions, but at night and with enemy flak below you, its as close to being a kamikaze run as you can get, without actually going on a kamikaze mission, because if you delay opening your chute for even a second, you're most likely dead. As they fell, a single thought ran through their collective minds, which went something like "Dear Lord, please don't let me die in the air," a thought which was repeated along with empty promises of what would be done in exchange for said wish being granted.

Whether it was luck or divine providence which got them all safely through the firestorm coming from all directions, is anyone's guess, but all sixteen of them made through the thousands of bursting shells. As the fell through the main conglomeration of the airbursts, with every burst they could see their deaths written in flashes of fire and steely fragments of the 57 mm and the 88 mm cannon shells exploding around them.

At five hundred feet, they pulled the ripcords on their chutes, opening them just before they met a sudden stop after their long drop, and they gently floated down to their target area, about two kilometers away from a compound where the main communications center for the regional military was located, deep in the Quanzhou prefecture.

"Johnson, you go left with Rivoli, Marks, and Beasley and you had better be sure to cover our asses. I do not want to find myself shot just because something completely immaterial to the mission distracted our snipers. Richards! You, Zale, and DeBernardo are never to be more than five feet away from me at any time for any reason you can think of, is that clear! The rest of you fall out and stick with me." The admiral quickly took charge of the situation, falling into the comfortable position of being in control of the people around and under her in the hierarchy of command.

Her commands given, the team responded with a quiet affirmative, and the four resident snipers moved off to the north, while the rest of the team moved in a standard arrow formation to the south. They moved at a slow pace, only 5 kilometers per hour, always scanning through the trees on the look out for security forces or something that could give away their position, and several times, they changed their path to avoid being followed by trackers.

Twenty-six minutes after they landed, the two parts of the team met up just outside the security fence of the compound, to go over the finer points of the operation they were about to perform, and to make sure everyone of them was on the same page of the same playbook.

"Okay ladies and gentlemen, I remind you that this a simple in and out job, no fancy heroics, no showboating, and absolutely no sticking around after the final bell, because if you do stick around, you will be on your own. You snipers will take up positions at the perimeter of the compound -the exact place will be left to you, but make sure that you have a good view of the entire area- and they will make sure that once we are inside, nobody from the outside decides to crash the party. We are here to knock out the comms in preparation for the invasion, and that is the only thing we are here to do, so do not get any ideas of doing anything stupid; yes, Jensen I am talking about you! The little stunt you pulled in North Korea in '97 almost sent the North into the South, along with the People's Republic of China on their heels, so don't get any ideas or I will shoot you and claim it was a lucky shot from the enemy, am I perfectly clear?"

Jensen remembered his 'little stunt' as the admiral had called it, and after what she had done to him then, which bordered on the realms of torture, he was in no hurry to cross her again. He responded meekly with a single word, "Crystal," which sounded almost strangled by fear and submission, both ingrained after being with the admiral for several years on the same SEAL team. She forced him to watch every single Barney episode, four times in succession, which caused quite a bit of subconscious scarring, evidenced in that Jensen's nightmares now consisted of a large singing purple dinosaur permanently moving into his apartment. From that point on, all anyone had to do to get him to leave the area post haste was start humming the first few bars of any of the regular songs, and he would either run away quickly, or curl up into a fetal position and start screaming.

"Ok, does everybody know what they have to do? Good. Let's go."

The admiral stealthily cut the concertina wire that blocked the way into the complex, and then she staked it back to allow room to crawl through, and with that, she moved through the wire, grabbing her rifle a moment later. The twelve SEALs moved through the complex, staying out of the floodlights range as much as possible, when it was not possible to avoid the light they quickly shot them out, making the way safe for general movement. The four snipers had been shooting every sentry they could see through their thermal imaging scopes, and they tried as hard as they could to take single shots through the head, making sure that they dropped their targets quickly and quietly.

Unfortunately, they could see the oncoming guard shift, which noticed several of their downed comrades, which made them immediately hit the alarm, lighting up the compound with dozens of florescent lights.

"Oh shit! Well, so much for secrecy, lets go balls to the wall, boys!" Admiral Porter was now in her element, a real knock down fight, where there is always a clear winner and many losers. She switched her M8 assault rifle from safety to its three round burst setting, and leveled it to the first enemy she saw. She squeezed the trigger, two went down, and so began one of the first true firefights of the Third World War.

The snipers were busy trying to cover the now rapidly evolving situation, taking shots where and when they could, but with their targets moving around so much it was getting very difficult to tell friend from foe. The turning point came when Beasley shot out the main generator, which powered the exterior lights, and from there on out it became a massacre, as the Americans had something that drastically put the battle in their favor, generation six night-vision goggles, which could see into the near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Even in the dark, wild shots can be dangerous, which Ensign Jensen found out through personal experience and three lucky, or unlucky –depending whose viewpoint, you are using— shots from a Chinese gunner. Three 5.65-millimeter rounds from a Russian-made RPK-74 sub-machine gun pierced his flak jacket; one nicked his left lung, another embedded itself into his left renal artery, causing a fair amount of internal bleeding, and the last penetrated his spinal column at the fifth lumbar vertebrae, effectively paralyzing him.

His anguished screams of pain filled the air, drawing both attention and incoming fire towards him. "Oh God! I've been hit! Somebody help me, plea--" Admiral Porter cut off his screams by knocking him out with a swift kick to the head, something her teammates greatly appreciated, as they had enough trouble with the Chinese without him drawing attention to them.

After three minutes of intense fighting, the SpecOps team had neutralized most of the second security shift, and the few survivors they silenced with extreme prejudice.

"Come on, let's get downstairs and blow this joint. The longer we are here, the more likely it is that the real army will show up and put us six feet under, something I have been avoiding of late." The admiral called out the team, and radioed the snipers to be on the look out for any incoming forces on the road from Fuzhou.

They entered the building, a place where Lieutenant Zale proved his worth, in both guiding the team and gathering vital intelligence from the computers, in which everything was in Chinese ideographs.

When the reached a four way intersection, Zale was asked which way to the control center, and he responded with a somewhat cryptic statement which baffled several members of the team. "Yeah, I think it's this way pointing to the left , either that or we should have taken that turn at Albuquerque."

They reached the control room just as the snipers radioed in that it looked like a full company of armor was coming in from Fuzhou, and a platoon of infantry was coming with them. This understandably caused some commotion with the remaining SEALs, for they had very few anti-armor weapons on their collective persons, thus a battle with Chinese armor would be a very one-sided fight. In fact, the only weapons that they had with them that could penetrate the multi-centimeter thick metal plates were the sniper rifles, specifically the M154 20 mm Barretts, which could easily put a fourteen-ounce slug into anything within range. The admiral thus ordered the snipers to keep the armor busy, and to take out as many tanks as they could while staying out of the field of fire as much as they possibly could, while the team at the base set their satchel charges and IEDs.

Beasley quickly changed magazines to the High Explosive shaped charge rounds, which could blast through up to 2.11 inches of super-hard vanadium carbide at just less than 2000 ft, and the armor used to make tanks is considerably less durable than vanadium carbide. With the first shot, taken from just under 1200 ft, the round easily penetrated the front glacis plate, spraying the driver and gunner with a molten jet of copper, melting the controls and turning the armored weapons system into a sixty-ton roadblock. The projectile moved so quickly, at just under Mach 5.6, that tracing where it had come from was a futile effort, and even the magnesium-iridium tracer charges on the slugs, did not help much. All the Chinese troops knew was that the shot came from a general direction, from the general area of their destination, which meant that the shooters could be anywhere in a ninety degree arc from the from of the column.

With every shot, another tank went up in flames, and some even had secondary explosions from the ammo stored within its steel belly, scattering the infantry in all directions and causing the remaining armor to begin firing wildly in the general direction of the snipers. Nearly all of the shots missed by half a kilometer, sending a lot of timber up in smoke, lighting numerous fires and even demolishing the nearby radio relay towers, something that the SEALs no longer had to do.

Rivoli called over the TacCom net to the demolitions team, "Hey, are you guys almost done in there? The armor is no factor and the infantry is scattered, but I'm pretty sure that very soon we'll have more company than is generally welcome."

"Yeah Rivoli, we're almost done, so don't get your shorts in a knot. We just have to set the timers and we'll be out in two shakes of a lamb's tail." The admiral acknowledged

Zale then chirped up with some information he had gathered from the abundant communication monitoring equipment. "Well, ladies and gents I think we have officially worn out our welcome. Currently there is a flight of 12 Mi-24 Hind E helos coming in to both make sure we do not leave, and to bring in a platoon of infantry to undo what we are doing. They are about fifteen minutes out so I propose we leave immediately and don't look back."

"Okay boys, were done on this end. Johnson, Rivoli! You two go set up the signaling beacon at the rendezvous point, the helo should be there within ten minutes and so will we. Marks and Beasley, you keep a close tail on them, but keep scanning the skies to make sure that those helos don't show up before we can get to the extraction area."

"Right-on boss lady, we'll do that. Johnson and I will set up the beacon, and – Oh shit! Sorry we have to run, a patrol just found us." A loud explosion echoed through the handheld transceiver, and then Rivoli's voice came through. "How do you like the taste of an M67 grenade you fuckin' chinks?!"

"Rivoli! That is not cool! Never use language like that in my presence, unless you want the Barney torture. You've been with me for several years, so you should know what not to do " The admiral may have been a tough-as-nails, grade-A bitch with little regard for feelings or incompetence, but the one thing she would not tolerate is discrimination of any kind. She had faced enough of it during her training at BUD/S, and as the only female in the SEALs, she went after discrimination like a bloodhound after a scent, or like a wolf on the hunt and by God, she would tear the offender apart if they did not repent.

"Yes, Ma'am, sorry ma'am," came the subdued reply over the radio.

Five minutes later the two parts of the team met at the extraction point, with one prisoner carried by Anton DeBernardo, and Jensen carried by James Richards, both of whom were effectively invalid for the time being, thus the necessity of being carried. The MH-53 arrived three minutes later, along with three RAH-66 Comanche providing cover fire and general protection for both the PAVE LOW and the ground troops.

The lead Comanche pilot began radioing the ground team and updating them on the situation. "SEAL 1 this is Lynx 1-1, I am picking up multiple signals bearing down on our position from both the land and air. You had better get your sorry butts into the chopper, unless you want to do an impersonation of Swiss cheese."

"Roger that Lynx 1-1, we are in the chopper. Let us go home. Lynx 1, do see any fireworks?" The admiral just had to ask whether the mission was a success.

"That we do Admiral, and they are a beauty. It looks like the entire complex is gone, how much C-4 did you use?" Lynx 1-3, playing tail end Charlie, had a perfect view into the valley, and indeed the entire complex was one massive fireball, mostly because directly below the control centre for the communications equipment, there was a storeroom for numerous types of defensive weaponry, and across from that was a fuel storage room for the generators.

"Good to know Lynx 1, and we used a moderate amount, so even in a best case scenario, only the building we hit should be destroyed, so don't look at us. We will just chalk it up to lousy construction on the part of former People's Republic of China, about par with everything else they did. This is SEAL 1 signing off."

As the MH-53L lifted off the ground, Lynx 1-3 saw the incoming flight of Hind helos, and told the other two to lock on with their Sidewinders and fire away. Lynx 1-3 locked on to the lead Hind with his forward-looking infrared and squeezed the trigger, firing both his M197 gun and letting a Sidewinder into the air, letting the tracer bullets burn towards the offending Hind E. They only had to delay the Hinds from getting within firing range just long enough to allow the Pave Low to make it to full speed and from there nothing short of a missile could catch it, and ground fire is inherently inaccurate when shooting at a low altitude fast moving target.

The missile covered the four miles to the target in less than thirty seconds, and even though the Hind launched a flare, but that didn't the seeker head on the missile for even a moment, and it plowed straight into the cockpit of the lead helo, immolating the pilot and copilot, and igniting the fuel, making for a very big boom. As luck would have it, some of the burning shrapnel pierced the fuel tanks of the two nearest Hinds in the formation, making them explode very violently, sending molten metal and charred flesh screaming through the air, starting even more fires in the forestry below. Lynx 1-1 and 1-2 saw this bit of good fortune and began firing as quickly as they could lock onto a target, and within only a couple of minutes the entire flight of Hinds was demolished beyond any possible recognition. The three Comanche helos turned to join the Pave Low on its flight to home, thus ending a nearly perfect SpecOps mission, but just beginning one of the first major allied operations of the war.


End file.
